Banal: Word Templates

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

Conferences often specify a 10pt body font on 12pt leading in their formatting requirements. Unfortunately, simply specifying a 10pt body font in Word is not sufficient because Word uses a leading a bit smaller than 12pt by default. This problem is exacerbated for authors when conferences provide a Word template with Word's default leading. Conferences may derive their 10pt template from a standard 9pt template, such as the ACM Word template, but only change the body font without checking the leading. For example, note the leading for the Word template for Mobicom 2011 (PDF format): 

Paper size: 8.50in x 11.00in
Text region: 7.00in x 9.15in
Margins: 0.75in x 0.75in x 0.81in x 1.04in (l/r/t/b)
Body font size: 10.00pt
Leading: 11.8pt
Columns: 2
Pages: 3
App: word

This situation causes unfortunate grief for both authors and program chairs. Chairs helpfully provide templates to avoid problems. Yet authors who naturally use the Word template provided by the conference will create documents that unknowingly do not meet the conference formatting requirements. When checked by banal, banal will flag these documents even though authors have simply done what was asked of them.

Two remedies for this situation are:

  1. Authors: Force Word to use 12pt leading on your document instead of its default. Fortunately, doing so is relatively straightforward. The following instructions are for Word 2010, and should easily adapt to your version of Word:

    1. Select the "Home" tab
    2. Right click on "Normal" paragraph style in the "Styles" bar, select "Modify"
    3. Click on the "Format" menu button at the bottom left, select "Paragraph"
    4. Click on the "Line Spacing:" menu, select "At least"
    5. Word should automatically fill in "12pt" in the "At:" field
    6. Click "OK" to close the dialog

  2. PC Chairs: To provide a Word template for submissions requiring a 10pt font on 12pt leading, here are two Word templates derived from the standard ACM pubform.doc 9pt template, but with a 10pt body font and a proper 12pt leading:

    1. Word template with a 6.5in x 9in text block (PDF format) 
      Paper size: 8.50in x 11.00in
Text region: 6.50in x 8.89in
Margins: 1.00in x 1.00in x 1.06in x 1.06in (l/r/t/b)
Body font size: 10.00pt
Leading: 12.0pt
Columns: 2
Pages: 3
App: word
    2. Word template with a 7.0in x 9.25in text block (PDF format) 
      Paper size: 8.50in x 11.00in
Text region: 7.00in x 9.23in
Margins: 0.75in x 0.75in x 0.81in x 0.96in (l/r/t/b)
Body font size: 10.00pt
Leading: 12.0pt
Columns: 2
Pages: 3
App: word
voelker@cs.ucsd.edu