Publishing conference proceedings using LaTeX part I: guidelines to authors

I had to create the proceedings for the workshop I am co-organizing yesterday (Workshop on Intermediate Representations).

My first idea was to create some introductory pages in pdf format using LaTeX and then use pdftk to assemble the files. But I also wanted all papers to look similar, and the whole proceedings to have page numbers, so I choose another way. As the whole procedure might be a bit long (and my posts usually are already quite long enough), I will split this "tutorial" into different posts. This one deals with the guidelines to authors, and will be followed by: part II, part III, other parts ???

Guidelines to authors

First of all, to maintain coherence, all authors should abide to the same rules when producing the final version of their articles. Here is the set of rules I gave them:

• Use the standard sigplanconf template with 9pt fonts, and maximum 8 pages (this was the template asked for the submission). Since those are not copyrighted proceedings, there was no need for the copyright (end of first column of the first page), so the option nocopyrightspace had to be added to the class.
  
• Since the workshop is held in France, I wanted A4 paper format. This is however not an available option for sigplanconf, so I choose margins that more or less did not change the original "letter" layout:
  
  • A4 paper
  • 1 inch margins at top and bottom
  • .65 inch margins at left and right
  This was easily achieved with the help of the geometry package:
  

  \usepackage[ a4paper,
    top=1in,
    bottom=1in,
    left=.65in,
    right=.65in,
    offset={0pt,0pt}
    ]{geometry}
  

  
  
• Some people reported problems when compiling using latex and then producing the pdf with dvipdf (the layout was right in A4 format in the .dvi, but back to letter format in the final pdf). Since I wanted pdf files anyway, I recommended to compile the LaTeX files with pdflatex.
  



• It is common to balance the two columns on the last page of an article as it looks better. This is usually the bibliography at this point, and I used to this manually by using \input{article.bbl}, once the bibliography was completely done, and inserting a \newpage at the right position (which, in two-column mode, starts a new column leaving blanks space at the bottom of the current one). But I discovered a package to do this:
  

  \usepackage{balance}
  

  And then at the end of the article:
  

  \balance
  \bibliography{article}
  



• Finally, you should make sure that there is no page number, no header, no footer, as these will be added later when compiling all articles. This is the default with the sigplanconf document class, but with another class you may have for instance to issue a \pagestyle{empty} command.