Full-Text Proceeding Instructions and Templates

It is not easy to prepare a formal book-length conference proceeding, but the eConf committee would like to make this process as straightforward as possible. To do this, we are supplying LaTeX templates which contain all of the components of a conference proceedings book. In this article, we will explain how to use those components to create a proceedings volume. 

Our templates are based on the book style of the 1999 Lepton-Photon Conference (LP99) proceedings. To the extent that you are willing to follow this style, you can make use of the templates straightforwardly. If you prefer to deviate from our style decisions, you are on your own. 

Creating a Conference Proceedings Volume Using the LaTeX Templates: 

1. Download the file article.tex (PS, PDF) and put it on your Web page well before the conference. Insist that the authors who will contribute to the proceedings follow this style. Actually, the file article.tex is essentially unembellished vanilla LaTeX. Your main problem will be to keep authors from complicating this with their personal macros, style files, etc. Encourage them to use the macropackage econfmacros.tex rather than their own personal macros, since those will inevitably conflict. Expand the package econfmacros as necessary. Encourage the authors to add items that should appear in the subject index; the method for doing this is explained near the top of the file article.tex. Finally, to insure that the authors are submitting to your correct LaTeX file, encourage them to submit their papers as eprints to the eprint arXiv. For LP99, papers for which we obtained the source from the eprint arXiv were typically trivial to process, while those from authors who submitted their article to us directly required, on the average, several days of work to bring into a manageable form.
2. Download and unpack the file mini.tar.gz. This file expands to a directory mini which contains the master file driver.tex. If you latex this file, you will obtain the LP99 Mini-Proceedings. (We apologize that you may see repeatedly the error: 'Overfull vbox 2.5 pts too high'. Please ignore this.) To include the indices, latex driver twice, then type the commands makeindex author and makeindex subject, and then latex again. 
3. Build your book by modifying the various files in the directory mini to suit your conference volume. The title page and table of contents are given by .tex files in mini. The frontmatter, backmatter, and section dividers are .tex files in the subdirectory matter. Each of these files are written in simple LaTeX that you should be able to modify to meet your needs.
4. LaTeX files obtained from the authors require some simple modification to achieve the book style. The LaTeX preamble must be stripped off, and the definitions at the beginning of the Discussion section (if you use this feature) must also be removed. The first few lines of the file should be modified as detailed at the beginning of the file poling.tex. EPS figures submitted by the author should be put into a subdirectory, and the figure references should be modified to reflect this. We found it useful to give the LaTeX file for each author the name of the author, and to create a subdirectory with this name to hold the figures. Finally, the author's flags of index items \index{name} should be changed to \index{subject}{name} so that these entries are inserted into the correct index.
5. Once the full set of articles are assembled, you will typically find duplicate macro definitions and citation names. These are flagged by LaTeX as it constructs the book. It is a tedious process to go through the articles systematically and change these by hand, but we could not find a better method.
6. Generate the subject and author indices. Typically, there will be inconsistencies in the names used to refer to index items. These must also be rectified by hand. Also, you should identify index items not indicated by the authors and flag these for inclusion in the index.
7. Now you can produce the book as a PostScript and subsequently a PDF file. Keep the .dvi file; you will need it in the next step.
8. To submit your volume to eConf, prepare a PDF file for each chapter of the book, a PDF file for each element of the front- and back- matter, and a compressed PDF file of the complete book.  Using our Web templates below, and the LP99 Web pages as a model, construct a set of Web pages that call out these PDF files. Put all files in a directory, tar and compress it, and send email to the eConf staff indicating where we can pick up the tar file by FTP, or if you have problems converting your document to PDF. We are happy to separately archive the source files if these are similarly prepared as a compressed tar file.
9. Upon receipt of the PDF (or PostScript if needed) files, we will add appropriate links to the SPIRES bibliographic database (for HEP conferences). This will complete the creation of an eConf presentation similar to that of the LP99 proceedings.

We hope that these materials will allow you to create a beautiful electronic book that will fully replace a commercially published volume. If you have any questions about these instructions, please contact us at mpeskin@slac.stanford.edu.

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