Paper Formatting Guidelines

Use the following guidelines when preparing your document for the symposium. For workshop paper submission, please see the workshop page.

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Guidelines

You are allowed a total of 4 pages for your document. This is the maximum number of pages that will be accepted, including all figures, tables, and references. Any documents that exceed the 4 page limit will be rejected.

All papers must be in English.

Documents should be formatted for standard letter-size (8-1/2" by 11" or 216mm by 279mm) paper. Any text or other material outside the margins specified below will not be accepted:

• All text and figures must be contained in a 178 mm x 229 mm (7 inch x 9 inch) image area.
• The left margin must be 19 mm (0.75 inch).
• The top margin must be 25 mm (1.0 inch), except for the title page where it must be 35 mm (1.375 inches).
• Text should appear in two columns, each 86 mm (3.39 inch) wide with 6 mm (0.24 inch) space between columns.
• On the first page, the top 50 mm (2") of both columns is reserved for the title, author(s), and affiliation(s). These items should be centered across both columns, starting at 35 mm (1.375 inches) from the top of the page.
• The paper abstract should appear at the top of the left-hand column of text, about 12 mm (0.5") below the title area and no more than 80 mm (3.125") in length. Leave 12 mm (0.5") of space between the end of the abstract and the beginning of the main text.

A format sheet with the margins and placement guides is available in the following file formats:

• PDF file (When you print this file, make sure the "shrink to fit" box is not checked!)
• PostScript file

These files contain lines and boxes showing the margins and print areas. If you print one of these files, then stack it atop your printed page and hold it up to the light, you can easily check your margins to see if your print area fits within the space allowed.

To achieve the best viewing experience for the review process and conference proceedings, we strongly encourage authors to use Times-Roman or Computer Modern fonts. If a font face is used that is not recognized by the submission system, your proposal will not be reproduced correctly.

Further important requirements are the next two:

• Please don't use any headers, footers nor page numbers.
• For LaTeX users, please avoid to use Type 3 fonts (see Section 4, Page 7, of PDF Specification for IEEE Xplore).

Templates

The following style files and templates are available for users of LaTeX and Microsoft Word:

• LaTeX style file with margin, page layout, font, etc. definitions.
• BiBTeX style file with bibliography style definitions.
• LaTeX template file, an example of using the "spconf.sty" and "IEEEbib.bst" files above.
• PDF generated from the template file.
• Sample strings.bib and refs.bib files.
• Word 97/2000 Sample, a template of correct formatting and font use.

We recommend that you use the Word file or LaTeX files to produce your document, since they have been set up to meet the formatting guidelines listed above. When using these files, double-check the paper size in your page setup to make sure you are using the letter-size paper layout (8.5" X 11"). The LaTeX environment files specify suitable margins, page layout, text, and a bibliography style.

In particular, with LaTeX, there are cases where the top-margin of the resulting Postscript or PDF file does not meet the specified parameters. In this case, you may need to add a \topmargin=0mm command just after the \begin{document} command in your .tex file. The spacing of the top margin is not critical, as the page contents will be adjusted on the proceedings. The critical dimensions are the actual width and height of the page content.