Camera-ready checklist for a CS paper

Submission formatting is about fairness between papers. Camera-ready formatting is about production: the publisher combines hundreds of PDFs into one volume, embeds metadata, assigns DOIs and archives the result. Each item below exists because some paper once broke that pipeline.

The checklist

Work through it with the final PDF open. Each item is explained in more detail further down the page.

Fonts: embedded, and not Type 3

A PDF can either contain the fonts it uses or only name them and hope the reader’s computer has them. Archival PDFs must embed every font, including the symbol fonts used in maths. Check with the pdffonts command (part of Poppler and Xpdf):

$ pdffonts paper.pdf
name                     type      encoding   emb sub uni
------------------------ --------- ---------- --- --- ---
ABCDEF+LMRoman10-Regular Type 1    Custom     yes yes no
GHIJKL+CMMI10            Type 1    Builtin    yes yes no

• A “no” in the emb column usually comes from an included figure: a PDF exported from a plotting program, for example, that references Helvetica or Arial without embedding it. Re-export the figure with fonts embedded, or convert its text to outlines.
• Type 3 fonts are bitmap fonts, which look blurry on screen and are rejected by many publishers. In LaTeX they appear when the T1 font encoding is used without scalable fonts installed. Load \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} together with \usepackage{lmodern} (see Latin Modern), or install the cm-super fonts.
• Modern pdfLaTeX, XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX embed their own fonts by default, so the problem is almost always a figure.

As a last resort, Ghostscript can re-embed fonts in a finished PDF: gs -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -dEmbedAllFonts=true -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -o fixed.pdf paper.pdf. Check the result carefully, because it rewrites the whole file.

PDF/A

PDF/A is the ISO standard for long-term archiving of PDF documents. It requires all fonts embedded, device-independent colour, document metadata in XMP form, and no features that depend on outside resources, such as encryption, JavaScript or external content. Not every venue requires it, but if yours does:

• With pdfLaTeX, the pdfx package produces PDF/A from LaTeX. You supply the metadata (title, authors, keywords) in a small .xmpdata file.
• Included figures must comply too; transparent or unusual colour spaces are the usual problem.
• Validate the result with a dedicated validator such as veraPDF rather than trusting the export, because “saved as PDF/A” and “passes validation” are not the same thing.

The copyright or licence form

Publishing needs permission from the authors, given through a form, usually signed by the corresponding author on everyone’s behalf. It comes in two broad kinds.

• A copyright transfer gives the copyright to the publisher, who then licenses certain uses back to you, such as posting a preprint or reusing figures.
• A licence to publish, or an open-access licence such as CC BY, leaves copyright with the authors and grants the publisher the rights it needs. Many open-access proceedings series in computer science work this way.

Read which one you are signing, check what it says about preprint servers and your own website, and upload it separately: the form never goes inside the paper. If your employer or funder has an open-access policy, check it before you sign.

The source bundle

Some series compile the final version themselves, to apply consistent headers, page numbers and metadata. Then you upload sources, not only a PDF.

• Put everything in one flat folder: the main .tex file, files it \inputs, figures, any non-standard .sty or .cls files, and the generated .bbl file.
• Include the .bbl, because the editors may not run BibTeX and the .bib alone is not enough.
• Remove absolute paths, local packages that only exist on your machine, and \usepackage lines for packages you no longer use.
• Test it: copy the folder somewhere new and compile it from scratch, for example with latexmk. If it doesn’t compile for you, it won’t compile for them.

Why final versions get sent back

Related

• How to format a CS conference or workshop paper in LaTeX: the rules for the submission version.
• LaTeX templates: where official classes live, and a minimal template.