[What If I Didn't Use START for Collecting Papers]
	- Jing-Shin Chang (jshin@csie.ncnu.edu.tw)
	- Revised from: 2009/06/04 12:24
		- http://nlp.csie.ncnu.edu.tw/~shin/acl-ijcnlp2009/publication/howto/What.If.I.Dont.Use.START.submission.system.txt
	- Online version:
		- Last Update: 2010/5/24
		- http://nlp.csie.ncnu.edu.tw/~shin/acl2010/publication/howto/aclpub/What.If.I.Dont.Use.START.submission.system.html

The ACLPUB tool was desinged to compile proceedings based
on the PDF files & metadata files dumpped from the START submission system.
If you are not using START to collect your papers,
you may create a tar file (call it "final.tgz") to simulate
the submissions dumpped from the START submission
system, then use the ACLPUB tools for compiling the
proceedings.

It is possible to use manual approach & Acrobat Writer to compile the proceedings.
However, ACL main conference and most workshops are now using ACLPUB
for compilation since it automates most compilation steps.
It will also make our proceedings (10+ books) to look unified in styles.

The tar file dumpped from START includes two files in each subdirectory
for each individual submission. For example, for paper id 173, it includes

    final/173/173_Paper.pdf		// PDF formatted papers
    final/173/173_metadata.txt		// Text metadata containing paper/author information)

The metadata file includes paper/author information like
titles, authors, emails, number of pages... It looks like the following
with "#=%=#" as delimiter for separating Key and Value about
a paper:

SubmissionNumber#=%=#173
FinalPaperTitle#=%=#My XXX Model for SMT
ShortPaperTitle#=%=#My XXX Model for SMT
Author{1}{Lastname}#=%=#Chang
Author{1}{Firstname}#=%=#Jing-Shin
Author{1}{Email}#=%=#jshin@csie.ncnu.edu.tw
Author{1}{Affiliation}#=%=#National Chi Nan University, Taiwan, ROC
Author{2}{Lastname}#=%=#
Author{2}{Firstname}#=%=#
Author{2}{Email}#=%=#
Author{2}{Affiliation}#=%=#
Author{...}{Lastname}#=%=#
Author{...}{Firstname}#=%=#
Author{...}{Email}#=%=#
Author{...}{Affiliation}#=%=#
Author{15}{Lastname}#=%=#
Author{15}{Firstname}#=%=#
Author{15}{Email}#=%=#
Author{15}{Affiliation}#=%=#
NumberOfPages#=%=#9
CopyrightSigned#=%=#Jing-Shin Chang
JobTitle#==#
Organization#==#NLP & MT Labs
National Chi Nan University
1, University Road, Puli, Nantou 545, Taiwan, ROC
Abstract#==#This paper proposes a novel framework called
XXX Model for SMT...
==========

(The trailing '==========' is part of the metadata.)

You can copy the above template and fill in appropriate
data for each paper, then create a paper collection that
is compliant to the START/ACLPUB underlying formats.

Some of the fields can be ommitted or be given faked data
since they may not be used in compiling proceedings.

You will need such information to generate
TOC and author indexes, and bib's. It should not be
difficult to derive the above form of metadata for each paper
and continue to work with ACLPUB to automatically generate
TOC, author indexes with very little cost.