Practical Advice on Installing Papers on the Web
The great temptation, once you've finished the camera-ready copy of
your conference or journal paper, is to move the postscript file to a
public place and publish its URL. The result is often a paper with
no page numbers, no indication of where it came from, and no way to
update it or associate additional information with it.
To avoid these embarassments, I recommend the following steps.
Restore Page Numbers
Most camera-ready material has no page numbers (these are added when
the complete volume is assembled). Before publishing your paper on
the web, turn page numbering on--there's nothing more annoying or
amateurish-looking than a paper with no page numbers. In LaTeX,
commenting out any \pagestyle{empty} and \thispagestyle{empty}
commands will usually do the trick. If not, add \pagestyle{plain} to
the prelude and \thispagestyle{plain} after the \maketitle. If those
don't work, you'll have to study the actual style files and options
that you're using and maybe enlist the help of a LaTeX expert (or read
the manual).
Add Bibliographic Data
It's a great paper! You want people to cite it! So why not help them
to do so?
A paper that provides no information but its title and
authorship is going to be cited (if at all) as "manuscript" or
"unpublished notes" or "technical report" or something equally
wounding. If it's a PODC paper, make sure the paper says so.
There are various ways of adding bibliographic data to a paper,
requiring varying degrees of LaTeX sophistication (I prefer one using
fancyheadings.sty), but the bare-bones simplest is to add
\\ \small To be presented at Some Conference, Some City and Country, Date
to the title. If that extra line causes the
pagination to mess up, stick a \vspace*{-1ex} or similar in like this
\title{\vspace*{-1ex}Original Title\thanks{sponsorship}
\\ \small To be presented at Some Conference, Some City and Country, Date}
Don't forget to update everything once the paper is published and you
know the actual LNCS (or whatever) volume and page numbers.
Pay Attention to Different Page Sizes
The USA uses 8.5x11 inch paper, while the rest of the world uses A4,
which is taller and narrower. Make sure the image area of your paper
is fully visible on both sizes of paper (you can check this with
Ghostview)--after all, you do want people to read all those
words it took such effort to write. The most common problem is
papers formatted for A4 that lose something at top or bottom (often
including the page numbers!) when printed on US paper. Change the
\textheight if this is a problem.
Some A4 papers just crash US printers (e.g., high-end HP Laserjets).
If you cannot reformat the paper, you can shrink it with the command
"psresize -Pa4 -pletter", using the psresize program from the psutils
package, which you can get from
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/ajcd/psutils/
Sundry LaTeX Tips
I strongly recommend use of the
style option cite.sty.
This sorts and compresses citations so that [12,10,14,13] becomes
[10,12-14] and also allows line breaks at the commas.
If you include URLs in your paper, then use the style option url.sty.
This allows line breaks at the slashes and makes things look much
nicer.
You can find CTAN (TeX arhive) sites and mirrors by
finger ctan@ftp.dante.de or finger ctan@ftp.tex.ac.uk
Prepare a Decent DVI and/or Postscript File
Most people with workstations and decent laser printers prefer
postscript files, but I've found that many people with PCs and
non-postscript printers are grateful if dvi files are available as
well (though these are difficult to make self-contained if any non-dvi
files were used for figures). 600 DPI postscript files look better
than 300 DPI on printers that are capable of that resolution, but the files
are much bigger, and take ages to print on modest postscript printers
(e.g., Laserjet 4ML), and also slow down Ghostview. Most 300 DPI
printers use some form of resolution enhancement that makes the output
look close to 600 DPI. Overall, I think it's best to post files at
300 DPI and to save 600 DPI for the camera-ready copy you send to the
publisher.
Make sure your postscript file is generated in ascending page order
(most printers stack face down, even if yours doesn't) and includes
the information that allows Ghostview to find specific pages. (Fire
up Ghostview on the .ps file and check you can go directly to page 6,
say. If not, get a dvips guru to help you). Make sure the beginning
of the postscript file looks something like this:
%!PS-Adobe-2.0
%%Creator: This is dvips, version 5.3 (C) 1986-90 Radical Eye Software
%%Title: testps.dvi
That is, it has line breaks and looks like a normal ascii file, and
has the correct %!PS-Adobe-2.0 at the front. Stuff generated with
Framemaker generally gets this wrong, and stuff from Windows and Macs
often has a ^D stuck in there. Files moved back and forth between
PCs and workstations often lose the line breaks.
You'll have to edit these bugs out by hand.
PDF Files
Some conferences require Adobe Acrobat (PDF) files. The ps2pdf
script (part of ghostview) can turn postscript into PDF. You'll get
much better results if your LaTeX file is set up to use the
Times Roman fonts that are built in to postscript and acrobat. Just
include
\usepackage{times}
in the prelude.
There is a better alternative, now: use pdflatex. If you
include the following in the prelude, the cross-references and
citations become "live" and clickable in acroread. The url
package similarly makes urls clickable. The includegraphics
command for the graphicx package can automatically choose
between eps and pdf graphics provided you omit the filename
extension. The epstopdf program can convert eps to pdf.
\usepackage{tocbibind}
\usepackage[bookmarks=true,hyperindex=true,colorlinks=true,backref=true,pagebackref=true]{hyperref}
Note: The new CSL database-driven Web Site automatically takes care of the following
topics; I've kept the information here for those
who have papers stored outside the centrally administered system.
Indirect Through an HTML File
If you advertise a URL that points directly to the postscript copy of
your paper, you lose all opportunity to revise and embellish the
information provided (short of rewriting the paper). It's usually
much better to publish a URL that points to an HTML file and have that
point to the postscript file. The HTML file can also provide an abstract for
the paper that allows people to decide how interested they are before
committing to a big download, and allows you to provide pointers to
both dvi and postscript versions of the paper.
In addition, an HTML file will get indexed by Google and other search engines, making it
possible for people to discover your paper without knowing its URL
beforehand. (The awesome Citeseer service indexes
postscript files.)
You can also add a BibTeX entry for the paper to the HTML file to make
it easier for people to cite it correctly (this doesn't remove the
need to have the bibliographic information on the paper itself, since
that may get passed around in printed form), and other information
such as pointers to specification files, related work, retractions
etc.
An example is
http://www.csl.sri.com/papers/csl-95-12/
Keep the URL Stable
Once you post a file on the web, search engines will index it, and
other people will make links to it (if you are lucky!). It is vital,
therefore, that the URL remains stable--nothing is more indicative of
an organization that doesn't understand the web than "404 Not found"
messages. This means that not only must you never move a file once
you've made it available but that you need to make sure your systems
guys don't go changing servers and file systems without placing the
necessary redirections in the server. I recommend running this
link checker
periodically to find dead links.
You might also find
The GNU/FSF Web Site Guidelines
useful reading.
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John Rushby (Rushby@csl.sri.com)