When submitting a paper to a conference organized by the IEEE IES Society, or by any other society of the IEEE, it is very important to follow a series of rules in the typographic and geometric format. These requirements are very strict, and help that the information in the paper can be viewed correctly by other members. And ensures that if these papers are printed, no special tricks or paper sizes are needed.

This page is a collection of tricks, how-tos and links to other web pages to help all the prospective authors to create the paper as smoothly as possible, avoiding common pitfalls and mistakes.

Page Sizes and Margins

The allowed pages sizes for papers are two: US Letter and ISO A4. Both are almost identical, but as Letter is wider than A4, and A4 is longer than Letter, the space dedicated for the columns of text is the same.

Let's take a look at the sizes:

Inside these frontiers author can place text, equations, photos and graphics using two columns. These two columns are equal for both page sizes. The size of one column is:

No longer columns are allowed. The columns are separated by a white space of 0.25" (6.35 mm).

The top margin for both columns is 0.75" (19 mm). No text, equations, photos nor graphics are allowed in the top margin area.

The bottom margin is different for the two paper sizes. No text, equations, photos nor graphics are allowed in the bottom margin area.

Left and right margins equal in size, and the size is also different in both page sizes, due to the different paper width. And once again: No text, equations, photos nor graphics are allowed in the sides margin areas.

All these geometrical constrains are reflected in a pdf document. This document is on full scale, and clearly shows how important margins are. The top and side margins sizes allows printing any document in any paper. The bottom part of the page are reserved for labeling purposes. If something got in this area, chances are that labels (IEEE catalog numbers, ISBN, page numbers) will overwrite it. That's why this area is colored in red.

Abusing bottom margin in A4 implies that people printing in Letter size will miss a part of the document. If they print resizing the document, it will look very small.

Fonts

Typographical aspect of characters in IEEE technical papers is to be keep as similar and uniform as possible. Since many years, the "Times" family of computer fonts, available in LaTeX packages and postscript printers is used. "Times New Roman", "Nimbus Roman No 9", ·"DejaVu Serif" and many others are also generally accepted. Please keep in mind : "clear typography, not fancy".

Templates

If starting a new paper, please start it on a fresh and empty template. IEEE provides a good set of template files for most modern text processors.These templates have nice examples and the right margins.

From your document to PDF

IEEE has a clear and (almost) complete technical definition of the allowed PDF characteristics for conferences. Lates version can be downloaded from IEEE Publishing Technology Resources page.

Too often authors think that there is only one way to transform their documents to the Portable Document Format (PDF). As the original authors of this encoding is the Adobe company, it seem logic that buying a license of Adobe Acrobat can do the trick. But nowadays PDF is an open standard and there are many alternative to create a file to submitt. Some are free, some are open source, some accept donatives, some are paid. Choose your flavor:

Also some text processors, like Microsoft Word, OpenOffice and LibreOffice can save the document into PDF format.

Missing Fonts

This is one of the most frequent mistakes. The pdf file must include (embed) the fonts needed to be shown on screen and printed. This is a configuration problem of the software that creates the pdf file. Just take a look at the user manual and to the configurations menus. The solution is often a few clicks away.