Banal: LaTeX Templates Ba • nal (adj.): lacking originality, freshness, or novelty

Conferences typically provide LaTeX templates for authors. Sometimes authors use these templates without modification, but find that the format checker in the submission system (HotCRP, EDAS) complains about the formatting. I certainly appreciate the frustration this situation causes. Sometimes banal makes a mistake, often not handling an unexpected situation. If this happens to you, you can notify me and I can help debug the error. Other times, though, it turns out that the LaTeX style file provided by the conference does not match the formatting requirements specified by the conference (!) — in this case, banal is simply reporting what it (correctly) finds. For instance, SIGCOMM typically requires a 10pt body font on 12pt leading. Yet the SIGCOMM 2008 and 2009 style files had the following in their LaTeX class file: \@setfontsize\normalsize\@xpt{11.9\p@}%\tenpt% %% Adjusted for 10pt This code specifies a 10pt font on 11.9pt leading. Needless to say, when the style file provided by a conference violates its own formatting requirements, much frustration for everyone ensues. PC Chairs: If you want the conference submission system (HotCRP, EDAS) to check the formatting of submitted papers, let me suggest submitting a test paper using the templates to the system, or running your templates through banal before you make them available to authors. Authors: If you used a template style file provided by the conference, yet banal persistently reports an error for your paper, you might glance through the template (or explicitly set the formatting specifications in your document). voelker@cs.ucsd.edu