Submitting to ICALP 2021

I am taking advantage of the pandemic to participate in conferences where it’s usually hard for me to participate because they require intercontinental travel. I have a paper in CSR 2021, and now am submitting a paper to ICALP 2021 (I count submission as participation, even in case the paper gets rejected). The latter requires submissions to be formatted in a specific way, a topic discussed at length on this blog.

Begin 12:48

Download the LIPICs package.

Try to compile their sample paper.

Get error message: ! LaTeX Error: File `l3backend-dvips.def’ not found.

Google solution. Says to install packages.

Unfortunately, I am using windows but I only have LyX, and the solution expects MixTeX.

Google how to install packages in LyX.

Can’t find anything simple.

Create a new document on overleaf.

Copy all the LIPIcs files there.

Try to compile their sample.

It works!

Paste my latex.

Usual avalanche of problems to be fixed at the speed of light.

Add dummy section “Introduction” which wasn’t in my paper, otherwise theorem numbers look weird.

Numbers still look weird. Something’s wrong with theorem statements.

Replace {thm} with {theorem}

Looks better. Still some wrong stuff all around, however.

No it wasn’t that. Remove the dummy section. It seems their “paragraph” environment puts strange numbers like 0.0.0.1

Replace \paragaph with \paragaph* everywhere

Actually, looks weird the way they put the ack– put back the dummy Introduction section.

Check page limit: no more than 12 pages, excluding references

I’m a little over. Does this really matter? Apparently, it does! Move last proof to the appendix. Actually, last proof is kind of short, I should move the penultimate proof. Update paper organization (next time I shouldn’t put it).

Final look. Fix a few indentations.

OK, time to actually submit. Go to the easychair website. They want me to re-enter all the information!? Why, after forcing me to enter title, keywords, etc. in their format, are they asking me to do this again? Can’t we just send the .tex file and extract it from there?

Oh come one, it’s just a few seconds of copy-paste.

OK, done, paper submitted.

End: 3:05

Well, next time it will be easier. Perhaps easier, but not easy because as the reader knows there will be another missing package, another incompatible system, etc. And of course, if the paper is rejected, then I won’t even save the time to convert it into camera-ready format. On the other hand, the benefit is non-existent. It would be better for everyone if in order to submit a paper you have to complete a random 1-hour task on Amazon mechanical Turk and donate the profit to charity.

Et Al. II

From Thoughts, January 16, 2018:

The et al. citation style favors scholars whose last name comes early in the dictionary. For example, other things equal, a last name like Aaron would circulate a lot more than Zuck. This problem is compounded by the existence of highly-cited papers which deviate from alphabetical ordering of authors. They carry the message: order matters, and some of you can’t use this trick, vae victis!

My suggestion is to avoid et al. and instead spell out every name (as in Aaron and Zuck) or every initial (as in AZ). It isn’t perfect, but improvements like randomly permuting the order still aren’t easy to implement. The suggestion actually cannot be implemented in journals like computational complexity which punish the authors into using an idiosyncratic style which has et al. But it doesn’t matter too much; nobody reads papers in those formats anyway, as we discussed several times.

From the STOC 2021 call for papers:

Authors are asked to avoid “et al.” in citations in favor of an equal mention of all authors’ surnames (unless the number of authors is very large, and if it is large, consider just using \cite{} with no “et al.”). When not listing authors’ names, citations should preferably include the first letters of the authors’ surnames (or at least the first three followed by a +, and possibly the year of publication). If using BibTeX, this can be accomplished by using \bibliographystyle{alpha}.