ACLPUB HOWTO: A Guide for the Publications Chair of an ACL-Affiliated Conference

Much more is coming on this webpage about how to do your job. (Please edit this webpage yourself and check it back in to CVS!)

This is just a quick stub explaining how to use the software. Start with the other HOWTO document, which is aimed at book chairs. You yourself will typically be the book chair for the main proceedings. Other volumes will typically be assembled by their program chairs and sent to you.

In the end, you will receive a bunch of proceedings directories from the different book chairs, including yourself.

Now switch to your role as publications chair to put everything together. Create a master working directory somewhere, perhaps called conference. You will do all your work as pub chair in this directory.

Copy the file .../aclpub/make/Makefile_pubchair to .../conference/Makefile.

Create a directory .../conference/books and unpack each of the proceedings directories under it. Of course you will have to rename the proceedings directories so that they don't all have the same name: e.g, .../conference/books/main, .../conference/books/w01-discourse, .../conference/books/w02-conll, etc.

Now here are the main things to build in the conference directory. All 5 of the following will be made if you type make all.

make print     # then try "make print.zip" to package up the results
make cdrom     # then try "make cdrom-web" to put the results on a web server for proofreading by others
make anthology # then try "make anthology-web" or "make anthology.tgz"
make advertisements
make copyright-signatures

Unfortunately, some of the CD-ROM templates (HTML files in aclpub/templates) still hardcode stuff from ACL 2005. This will eventually be corrected through use of the meta file, but for now, your best bet is to edit the templates to your liking and remake.

There are a number of other things I'm planning to improve. The most important is to support hand-editing of automatically generated files, in such a way that the edits are preserved if the file is automatically regenerated.

You should improve this document yourself, to pass on your experience to future chairs. Please contact Jason Eisner for a CVS username and password. Then you can modify your copy of aclpub and check the changes back into the CVS repository as follows:

# put this in your .bashrc or .cshrc file
export CVSROOT=:pserver:USERNAME@ftp.clsp.jhu.edu/aclpub # bash
setenv CVSROOT :pserver:USERNAME@ftp.clsp.jhu.edu/aclpub # csh

# only have to do this once on a given machine
cvs login     # now type your password

# check in your changes
cd .../aclpub
cvs update
cvs commit

If you don't want to set CVSROOT, you could try it this way:

alias aclcvs='cd ~/aclpub; cvs -d :pserver:USERNAME@ftp.clsp.jhu.edu:/aclpub'
aclcvs COMMAND    # instead of cvs COMMAND

Jason Eisner