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.