Formatting support for ACM conferences

When submitting a paper to an ACM conference you must format your paper in accordance with the ACM specification for conference proceedings. You can find this at http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/sigguide-v2.1sp.htm (Section 1.1 contains the specification).

ACM has produced a couple of LaTeX, Word Perfect, and Microsoft Word style files that meet this specification. You can find them at http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html. Unfortunately, there are a number of things wrong with these templates; their multiple problems have been described by Norman Ramsey in a SIGPLAN Notices article ("LaTeX support for proceedings", Norman Ramsey, SIGPLAN Notices 37(4) (Apr 2002), pp1-3). Please do not use these style files if you can at all avoid it; they look pretty bad. (In particular, the ALL-UPPER-CASE SECTION TITLES are pretty garish.)

Happily, Mike Sperber has produced a LaTeX class file that does not have these deficiencies, and meets the ACM spec. You can find it here:

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/icfp04/sigplan-proc.cls

Word Perfect and Microsoft Word users can use the style files found at the ACM link above -- they are not as attractive or as well engineered as Sperber's design, but will meet the spec. If you are preparing your paper with some system other than LaTeX, then you are on your own with respect to the ACM formatting specification.

Using the new style

The new class file defines all the same LaTeX macros as the ACM template, so please read the ACM guide at http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/sigguide-v2.1sp.htm first.

Mike's class file has the following differences from the ACM one

It doesn't load any of the utility packages, specifically, it doesn't load epsfig, amssymb, amsmath, and amsfont. You can load these yourself with \usepackage{epsfig} etc.
It depends on David Carlisle's pslatex.sty package, found on any CTAN host. You can, for example, find a copy at ftp://ftp.dante.de/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/pslatex/.
It conforms to LaTeX2e's NFSS2, so there aren't any font-changing commands specific to section headers, like \secit{} etc.

Here are few other points about the style.

There is a preprint document-class option. Say
```
  \documentclass[preprint]{sigplan-proc}
```
It only switches off explicitly doing \pagestyle{empty}. By default this just switches on page numbers, but it also gives you control over page headings. For example, you can say this in the document preamble
```
  \pagestyle{myheadings}
  \markboth{Fred Bloggs}{Draft of: \today}
```
Ideally, the preprint option would add a date to the title page, but it doesn't yet. I add
```
  \subtitle{\today}
```
to do the job. (The subtitle command is documented in the ACM guide.)
You can suppress the ACM copyright info, and replace it by something else, by saying
```
    \toappear{Submitted to the Wobble Workshop 2007.}
```
This is useful for drafts of papers not yet accepted for publication.
You can suppress the entire ACM copyright space by using the nocopyrightspace document-class option:
```
  \documentclass[nocopyrightspace]{sigplan-proc}
```
This is meant for when you want to typeset other papers or drafts that are not ACM copyright and don't need the space.

Font magic and paper size

Like the ACM template, this class file uses Times Roman type-1 fonts as required by ACM. However, this means that typewriter font, often used for typesetting program code, comes out rather faint and spidery. I much prefer the (LaTeX default) Computer Modern Typewriter font, both on screen and on paper.

If you wish to use the CM font, it is easily arranged -- just add the command

  \renewcommand{\ttdefault}{cmtt}

However, CM is typically defined as a native TeX/Metafont font, not a PostScript type-1 font, and ACM requires type-1 PostScript fonts, so you (may) also have to change your dvips command:

  dvips -t letterSize -P cmz  <...whatever you have normally...>

The -t letterSize tells dvips to format for US letter size, which is what ACM wants, and the -P cmz somehow solves the type-1-font problem. (This is copied from the ACM FAQ on this topic; see the whole FAQ topic for more information. See also the dvips documentation. Also note that, on a standard Linux system, the font configuration file referenced by -P cmz lives in /usr/share/texmf/dvips/config/config.cmz and /usr/share/texmf/dvips/bluesky/config.cmz.) Incidentally, doing this also means that when you convert to PDF you get decent looking output.

Don't forget the -t letterSize argument, especially if you are in a country that uses A4 paper by default!

A plea for proper style

The single most common, blatant error in academic writing is the use of citations as "nouns." Citations are, in fact, annotations , that is, parenthetical things tacked onto the sentence structure. Think of them as being like footnotes. If you delete all the footnotes and citations from your paper, you should still have a coherent, grammatically correct paper. Do not write

The result of [Mouse94] is fundamentally flawed -- indeed, willfully wrong-headed -- as we had previously shown in [PrincipiaInformatica92].

Instead, write

Mouse' result [Mouse94] is fundamentally flawed -- indeed, willfully wrong-headed -- as we had previously shown as early as 1992 [PrincipiaInformatica92].

This sometimes requires you to change your sentence structure around. But it is never correct to use a citation, such as [Harper92] or [Peyton-Jones85], as a part of a sentence. Authors commonly do this. It is not correct. People who know better grimace when they stumble over this kind of error. Don't be one of the unfortunate souls whose published oeuvre is blighted in this unseemly manner.

Questions

I hope that this page takes care of most of the issues involved in typesetting your paper. If you have any questions about the new style, ask me in the first instance (kfisher at research.att.com). Mike Sperber has done enough! (I should also thank Simon Peyton-Jones and Olin Shivers, who wrote the first and second versions of this page for ICFP 2002 and 2003.)

Kathleen Fisher