I am stuck with Windows XP Home, and I am sometimes tempted to write papers for the JIS, but I'm daunted by the task. If I had looked at the current JIS home page, I wouldn't have had to ask about the format, since the JIS accepts only LaTex documents. That settles the format issue. Besides, the overwhelming majority of recommendations were to use LaTeX anyway. AMS articles require AMS LaTeX, but I don't think I'm in danger of writing one of those for the moment.
What I recommend: Install Ghostview for looking at postscript files. Install MiKTeX. Put \MiKTeX\Main\miktex\bin on your path. Download http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/journals/JIS/VOL8/Stay/stay44.tex and put it in your working directory. MiKTeX doesn't have a couple of the style files that JIS uses installed by default, so put a % sign in front of lines 17, 20, and 40 to comment them out. 17: %\usepackage{fullpage} 20: %\usepackage{psfig} 40: %\leavevmode\epsffile{logo129.eps} The JIS editors will uncomment those. At a command prompt in your working directory: copy con texps.bat @echo off latex %1.tex latex %1.tex dvips %1.dvi del *.log del *.aux del *.dvi<CTRL Z> This takes the filename (no extension) of a tex document in the current directory and renders it to postscript. One line is repeated twice because TeX uses a two-pass system to make sure references are OK. It also deletes all the intermediate files. You wouldn't want to do this if you were writing a book, but for small articles it's fine. In this case, at the command prompt in your working directory type texps stay44 The result will be a .ps article without the JIS logo.
From here, make a copy of the file and name it template.tex, then strip out the abstract, sections, and bibitems. Compile the blank article to make sure you didn't strip too much. Copy the template; name it after your article.
Now you can write up your article. If you want to do something in TeX, find someone else's article that does something similar, download it, and look at the source. When you want to see your work, rerun the texps batch file. The compilation will stop and give you a line number and position in the line if it thinks something went wrong. <Return> lets it take a guess at a correction; <x> abandons the compilation. Use Ghostview to look at the result. It will refresh when you switch focus, so you can see what your changes look like. Make sure you follow the guidelines on writing style and bibliography found on the JIS homepage. Mine was returned a few times because I didn't do everything just right. -- Mike Stay staym@clear.net.nz http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~msta039