2011Q3 Reports: Publications Chairs
Summary
This year, the paper proceedings are not longer printed. Only the cdrom proceedings are produced using a card-type USB memory stick. It is convenient for notebooks without a big cdrom drive but with a tiny USB interface. It is also convenient to put it into one's pocket since its small size. The memory card can also be re-used to hold one's notes taken during the conference. We hope that people will like it.
This year, we continuously use the START wrapper of ACLPUB. It is glad to notice that all book chairs (except the tutorial chairs) use the START wrapper directly to compile the proceedings. The START wrapper implements typical ACLPUB make options for producing a single-volume proceeding. Therefore, it is convenient for generating a single-volume proceeding if its input is well-formed, and if the proceeding is not going to be divided into multiple volumes. Besides, the START wrapper has now provided a function to upload conventional ACLPUB order files. Therefore, the Schedule can be directly uploaded and easily setup this year.
Problems and Suggestions
Obviously we encounter some difficulties in using the START wrapper because many of the book chairs are unfamiliar with it. Basically, there are too many templates and the book chairs need to modify those scripts directly. This causes lots of questions which we have to address. One big problem is that it is difficult for the book chairs to easily locate the errors and figure out what they are. Especially, some of them are very tricky and absent from the manual, e.g. the tiny deviation of margins and that Bibtxt URLs should end with %02d or %03d due to naming conventions. A better START wrapper is necessary to ease the book chairs and the publication process.
Besides, the inherent limitations of ACLPUB still leave the book chairs some problems to resolve manually. Some problems are quite tricky. For instance, one author has a symbol "#" in the title, but obviously this symbol is one of the reserved words in Latex. It causes a serious error and confuses us for a long time. Finally, we hope that the authors can conform to the style files strictly next year and double-check when submitting their final versions, especially when their papers include non-English words.
The START administrator, Rich Gerber, has been very helpful in answering questions regarding the START wrapper and ACLPUB. He has resolved many problems that had not been considered when the wrapper was initially implemented.
Actually, the publication progress of earlier stages for workshops is a little slow because some workshop chairs are unaware of those customized templates. So it is necessary to give them a simple list of actions to be done. The current instruction manual is too complicated.