Subject: [ACL-2010] [Proceedings] Reminders for Proceedings Compilation and Answers for Some FAQs
Date: 2010/6/2 07:13 AM

** This email is intended for book chairs who are going to compile
** the proceedings of the workshops or co-events. If your workshop
** book chairs are not in the lis, please forward this email to them.
** Sorry if you received it from multiple email accounts.

Dear book chairs of workshops and co-events,

Here are a few reminders related to proceedings compilation
and problems that have been detected from various workshops
or events:

1. **Due Date**:

    June 13 - send the publication committee your compiled proceedings,
    including the whole proceedings directory (which can be produced
    using the ACLPUB "make all" option after making the cdrom image.)

   You are also kindly requested to send a version of the program
   schedule information to the local committee (as soon as program
   schedule is stablized and without waiting for the the proceedings
   to be fully compiled) by **June 9** (early test) and **June 16** (final).

2. Publication Home Page:

    I have setup a simple homepage for all publication instructions and
    data that you might need, just in case you have missed any message.

    I will also update the **FAQ** section when important questions
    from book chairs are raised. You can check here first to prevent from
    encountering the same problems of other book chairs.

    The home of the publication instructions is:
    http://nlp.csie.ncnu.edu.tw/~shin/acl2010/publication/

    See through the left-hand side menu to guide you to
    the whole compilation/publication process.

3. Paper Size (Source):

   Check whether the source PDF is in A4. If not ask the authors
    to send you an update immediately.

   Use "pdfinfo" or other commands if you are running on linux.
   START will automatically detect the paper sizes and provide you
   the page size information.

4. Paper Size (Target):

    Check if the compiled proceedings and the PDF's under
    cdrom image are also in A4 size.

    If not, some of the  the templates (book.tex, cd.tex.head) used
    for generating the CDROM pdf's may not be tailored for A4 size.

5. Paper Length:

    Be sure the number of pages is each paper's metadata file
    is consistent with the real length. Or you will get wrong page
    numbers in your proceedings. Some authors may provde
   a page length like "8+1" instead of a single number.
   Such ill-formed input may crash ACLPUB.

6. Margins: Check if the paper's margins are exceeded.

7. PDF version:

    Some (but not all) PDF-1.5 files (or above) cannot be handllded
    by ACLPUB. You can ask authors to re-submit PDF with
    compatibility lavel 1.2, 1.3 or 1.4.

8. Special Characters in Names and Titles:

    One major source that crashed ACLPUB is the special symbols
    in the titles and names of the metadata files for each papers.

    ACLPUB uses LaTex as default source in generating TOC,
    programs, and author index. Ideally, only  ASCII characters or LaTex
    symbols can appear in titles and authors names. (Actually
    non-ASCII's are not encouraged as part of the title.)

    Special symbols or characters that can crash ACLPUB  include:

    (a) Accent characters in unicode (UTF-8) or Latin-1 (etc.).

    (b) Special symbols in unicode or latin-1, such as double
        quotes, long hyphen marks, and various punctuation marks.

    (c) Normal ASCII symbols that have special meanings in LaTex.

        For instance, '&' may be treated as LaTex TAB delimiter
        in LaTex Tables, and thus may mess the TOC table.
       It should be escaped as '\&' if it is par of the title (or authors).

    (d) Mathmatical symbols in title. (... should be fixed as LaTex
        math symboks, like $epsilon$. But it is better to ask the authors
        to use a different title.)

    Most accent characters in (a) and some punctutaion symbols
    in (b) are automatically converted into  LaTax symbols (by a
    "ascii-to-db.pl script). therefore, special symbols may not
    necessarily crash ACLPUB.

    But some of them may have not been included to ACLPUB's
    internal script/table.

    If this is the case and stop the normal proceedings compilation,
    you can simply replace those accent characters or special symbols
    with their LaTex equivalents in the metadata files before regenerating
    the proceedings.

    You can also notify the publication chairs and the START administrators
    of such findings so other book chairs will not encounter the same 
    trouble in the future.

    The special characters (in LaTex form) will later be coverted into
    HTML's entities in TOC, program and author index. If you find
    them un-handlled or crashing ACLPUB, you can also hand edit the
    HTML files (or the db-to-html.pl and db-to-pdfmetadata.pl scripts.)
    Again, your notification to the publication chairs and START
    administrators will prevent the same trouble in the future.

9. Correctness:

    Check the correctness of the title pages, copyright page
    (including ISBN number) and citation stamps on the
    first page of each paper, and see if the information is
    correct for your workshops.

   (Short papers, SRW, demos, tutorials abstracts will be combined
   into a single Companion Volume, therefore, they don't have their
   own ISBN, which is commented out from their copyright page.)

   If not, you may have used wrong templetes.
   You should choose the 'titlepage.tex', 'copyright.tex',
   'citation-stamp.tex' that are customized for your specific
   workshop.

   We had did our best to acquire your specific data from the web
   but we may make mistakes.

   You should also check those hyperlinks that are automatically
   generated in the TOC, program, and author index of the PDF
   and HTML files.

   The time stamps for each paper in the program schedule should
   be checked carefully.

10. Chairs Information:

    Check if the information of your chairs on the 'meta' is correct
    and complete. They will appear in the HTML files of the cdrom
    image.

   We only have their names from the official ACL-2010 website,
    but not their affiliations when we custimized them.

   You can also include more chairs that you want to acknowledge
    so their names and affiliations appear on the index pages.

11. Consistency of Names:

    Some authors may have two or more accepted papers. Check if
    their names are spelled consistently. Otherwise, we may have
    more two or more author index entries for the same author.
    For instance, "Chris Manning", "Christopher Manning" and
    "Christopher D. Manning" may refer to the same author.

    You can edit your metedata files to make them consistent.

    Some authors have a single name that is neither the last name
    or first name. For instance, we have the name "Mausam"
    registerd as both the first and last names; but actually the
    correct name is simply "Mausam". If you find such names
    incorrectly handlled, in TOC, program, author index in
    the PDF proceedings, front matter, BibTex or HTML files,
    you may grep your source files, and manually correct the
    sources. (Some minor patches had been made in our
    distribution, but not for all the above places.)

12. Consistent Capitalization of Paper Titles:

    To have a consistent style in titles, all word in the title should
    be capitalized except function words like articles, conjunctions
    and prepositions. Once you edit them in the metadata files
    the generated TOC and program schedule will be consistent.

Regards,
Jing-Shin --^^-