Here is a summary of the problems we encountered so far when compiling main proceedings, and how we handlled them. Be adviced to check if you also encountered the same problems.
A: It is normal if an empty page is inserted so the next important section (e.g., program schedule or the 1st page of 1st paper) of the proceedings can start from an odd (right-hand side) page.
You may have noticed that most book chapters start from an odd-numbered page. This is a general parctice for book compilation. ACLPUB also enforced such a publication convention in its templates. Of course, normally only ONE additional page will be inserted for this purpose.
The program schedule provides an index (including physical hyperlinks), by time, for people to point to the rght papers at the right times, just like the paper index, which leads people, by paper title, to the right paper, and author index, which finds right papers by authors names.
The various indexes are provided by the book chairs to find papers by different criteria. So makeing them as complete as possible is a good practice.
Even though you used the same time slot, who would know that in advance if they do not even have a program schedule. Furthermore, the program for cetrtain event is really tiny, which may cost you only an hour or two, and ACLPUB can then generate a pretty printout for you. So I guess I would take the cost so the readers can browse the papers easier.
http://nlp.csie.ncnu.edu.tw/~shin/acl2010/publication/howto/ACLPUB.meta.html
for details.
Most likely, you will NOT need to edit the "index.htnl.head" itself unless you want to add additional workshop/event-specific information for your events. Furthermore, if you don't have an URL to refer to your specific events in the meta file, simply use the URL of the official ACL-2010 home page (or the webpage for your event under the official home.)
START does not provide information in the metadata regarding paper size and margins.
For paper size, you can open an accepted PDF file with Acrobat (set it as your default PDF viewer) and move the cursor to the lower left corner of the PDF reader. The paper size will be shown there. This works fine if you don't have a lrge number of papers.
If you have a large number of papers, you can download the arachive (as final.tgz or final.zip) from START, and use the "pdfinfo" utility (or maybe other pdf tools) to identify whether any paper is in A4 size or not.
"pdfinfo" also provides other information about a PDF file, such as the number of pages, and its PDF version.
Example: pdfinfo output ... Title: Improving Chinese Semantic Role Labeling with Rich Syntactic Features Subject: ACL 2010 Keywords: Author: Weiwei Sun Creator: LaTeX with hyperref package Producer: pdfeTeX-1.21a CreationDate: Wed Jun 2 03:16:27 2010 Tagged: no Pages: 5 Encrypted: no Page size: 595.276 x 841.89 pts (A4) File size: 310243 bytes Optimized: no PDF version: 1.4
For those who have their final.tgz (accepted papers plus metadata) downloaded, I have a small script to run "pdfinfo" over all files, and see if they are A4, and extract the paper titles and authors emails if they are not A4 from the metadata. See:
These tools are private and absolutely no guarantee :-)
If a paper is formatted as A4 and the authors used the standard acl style files, the margins should normally be OK.
To check the margins, you can make a draft version of the proceedings, using START's version of ACLPUB, or the 'make draft' command for ACLPUB installed on your machine, and check the draft version. The first two pages of each paper will be used to compile a simplified proceedings, together with bounding boxes for the papers. By inspecting the draft version, you should be able to find which papers are exceeding the boundaries.
You can actually check the other workshop related inforation for your proceedings by inspecting the draft version as well. Once the draft version looks OK, you can proceed with generating the full, shipout version and the cdrom imge.
When Jing-Shin suggests that you customize your templates, etc., it is not as big a deal as some people seem to think.
In START, in the manager console, go to
The second tab from the left is "Templates". If you click on it, you'll see text boxes which appear below. ALL THESE CAN BE HAND-EDITED. If you click on the sub-tabs, "Sections" , "Settings", "Headers", "CDROM", you find more headers which can be edited. In fact, all your content can be hand-edited via these text boxes. Your Program and TOC can be hand-edited as well, using the tab at the top called "Program". A working knowledge of Latex is required to make the edits, but it isn't so complicated.
The publications chairs this year had created customized "titlepage.tex", "copyright.tex", "citation-stamps.tex" and "meta" for each workshop, which included the workshop-specific information in them, including ISBN, bib_url, your workshop date(s), proceedings titles, and so on.
The main purpose of customization is to have a uniform proceedings style across different workshops. We don't want some proceedings to use extremely large fonts while others use really tiny ones, for instance.
If you are using the ACLPUB on START, these templates should have been uploaded by the START administrators for your workshop. You can check if your ISBN on the templates is the same as announced in the publication home page. If not, please download these customized templates from
The workshop-specific templates for WS07, for instance, are located at,
The ISBN is already included in the "copyright.tex" file. The "bib_url" path assigned for your workshop is in the "meta" file. Other workshop-specific information, such as formal proceedings title, date(s) of your workshop, etc. are already in the *.tex and meta files.
Most likely, you only need to modify the chairs part of the "meta" file, and verify if the workshop information is correct.
You can do this through START's GUI if you are using START's version of ACLPUB. Or you can use a text editor if you are running the conventional ACLPUB on linux.
For a complete list of the ISBN's and bib_url's, they are available in the publication home page at:
If you are going to install a conventional ACLPUB, and run it on your linux/unix box, you have to download a special version, which had been tailored for producing A4-size proceeding, and includes some fixed scripts. The official version in JHU is not directly applicable for ACL-200 since its templates are tailored for generating Letter-size proceedings. The ACLPUB-A4 for ACL-2010 is available at:
This package also includes the above mentioned customized templates. The customized templates for WS07, for instance, are located at: "aclpub/templates/local/wks.2010/ws07/" (The sub-directory names indetify different workshops.) You should copy ws07/*.tex to "aclpub/templates/" or make a symbolic link to them. And the "meta" file should be copied to your working directory.