The Layout Editor transforms the copyedited versions of the submission into galleys in HTML, PDF, PS, etc., files which the journal has elected to use for electronic publication. This system does not provide software for converting word processing documents to galley formats, so the Layout Editor should have access to and be able to use third-party software packages for creating galleys (with Adobe Acrobat for PDFs, for example; or Dreamweaver for HTML), which present the articles on the screen with a well-formatted and readable layout, in the manner of scholarly journals, and with an eye to this new publishing medium (by consulting the layout used by other publishers of online journals, such as Highwire Press, for example, in the life sciences or Project Muse in the humanities).
More information can be found here.