LaTeX Tips

General Issues

Sample files (top)

Attached are sample files for writing a paper. Please use these regardless of whether you expect your paper to be submitted to a conference or journal.

Please make sure to delete anything that acts as placeholder, such as "Our Great Algorithm" and also examples that I left in there from a previous paper. Those are intended to let you see how to write things in LaTeX^?.

As long as I still see place holder material in one of your papers I will not edit it. This is because leaving something inappropriate in a paper for submission would be extremely embarrassing.

In the format of those files, a conference paper is approximately 28 pages in length and a journal paper approximately 40 pages. Note that if you have had a conference paper accepted, you typically would have to add about 40% which results in a journal paper of about 56 pages. (This is considered long by most journals to which we submit, in particular KAIS and DKE, causing one of those dilemmas of publishing. Notice that workshop papers are often shorter, which decreases this problem. However, I do not travel oversees to only present a workshop paper.)

Font size issue (top)

Sometimes there is a problem using LaTeX to create first a .ps document and then a .pdf document where the font size shrinks. This was found to be caused by an A1 paper setting in the dvips command which causes this behavior. Use dvips -t letter <filename> to resolve.

BibTex author entries (top)

{ firstname lastname and firstname lastname ... } To cause the correct placement of "et al" use and others in the author entry.

Escape italics in Definition (top)

If you are using an environment such as "definition" or "theorem" and you want to escape the italics formatting use: \textnormal{my text} . Within a math environment you can also use \mbox{} .