Author Manuscripts - clarification of PLoS Comp Biol's policy

Just a quick post. I and some colleagues recently submitted one of our papers "Steering Evolution with Combination Therapy to Prevent the Emergence of Bacterial Antibiotic Resistance" (which you can read a nice post on +Artem Kaznatcheev's blog here) to PLoS Computational Biology, and I was surprised that an option to submit a full 'author manuscript' wasn't present, but instead that we had to upload images separately, reformat and the like.  This surprised me, because the first time I submitted there, in a paper I wrote with +David Basanta and +Alexander Anderson I didn't remember having to do this. It might be that I just misread, but at the time I was confused.

So, I tweeted to them a quick question and it turns out they DO accept author manuscripts, but that their instructions are on the fritz right now!  

@CancerConnector A single PDF at 1st submission is ok but needs to be changed at revisions. Will contact you by e-mail.
— PLOS Comp Biol (@PLOSCompBiol) April 13, 2015

Anyways, they replied quickly with an email as well stating:

We allow a single PDF to be submitted at initial submission, although as the paper is subsequently revised, we require the manuscript to be submitted in separate parts to begin to prepare the manuscript for production. This is to avoid asking authors to do everything at once at acceptance, a process that can, in some instances, be a substantial task.

I understand that this is not clear on the author instructions and we are looking at ways of improving our instructions.

So - submit away. And, thank for the quick reply to PLoS CB... now it's just fingers crossed for our submission.