Camera Ready Checklist

Congratulations on having your paper accepted! Now you start the next phase of preparing your paper for publication.

Immediate Steps

If you have a shepherd for your paper there are some immediate steps you will need to take. You will be crafting a plan for addressing reviewer comments and sending the plan to your shepherd for review. The reviews may have comments, feedback, or suggestions that rankle a bit. Resist letting any annoyance you might feel show through in your plan. Instead, ask yourself how you can best take advantage of all of the feedback in the reviews to make the best final version of your paper as you can.

• Decide among the authors when you will have the plan ready to send to the shepherd.
• Send mail to the shepherd (or post to conference management system) soon after the accept notification thanking them for being your shepherd, and giving them an estimate on when you will send the plan. (Example)
• Create the plan as a Google doc and iterate among the authors. Ask around for previous plans as examples to use.
• Send the plan to the shepherd by the date you said you would. This is also a good time to ask the shepherd how much time they need to review the camera ready draft (i.e., when you will need to send the camera ready to give the shepherd enough time to review and sign off).

Address Comments

Once you have settled on a plan and sent it off to the shepherd, you can start working on the camera ready version itself. You will be addressing comments and generally adding/fixing everything that you want to go into the final version of your paper.

Before making any changes to the paper content:

• Note the version tag for the commit for the submitted version.
• Save the pdf of the submitted version for reference as you make changes.
• Go through conference camera ready checklist
• Change the paper style to use the camera-ready formatting. Often the camera-ready format is different than the submission format (e.g., it uses a different font or text area size, often providing more space).

Send to the Shepherd

As you approach the date you and the shepherd agreed upon:

• It goes without saying, but make sure you have done everything you promised the shepherd you would do. If there are points where you have changed your mind (e.g., something that looked possible turned out not to be), then communicate them to the shepherd.
• Prepare a diff between the submitted version and the latest version you are sending to the shepherd. Use the latexdiff tool, but be prepared to do some manual fixup to make the diff work out correctly. Do not save this step for the absolute last minute, experiment a day or two ahead of time.
• Send the latest version and the diff to the shepherd.

Note that the paper does not have to be in its absolute final state. After sending a version off to the shepherd, you still have time to...

Polish

After you have finished making all of the changes to the final paper content, do one last pass to polish it off:

• Spell check
• Go through conference camera ready checklist again
  • Add terms, keywords, and categories (if required)
  • Use only Type 1 or TrueType fonts (if required)
  • Embed fonts in pdf (if required)
• Use active voice throughout: "is implemented" → "we implemented"
• Thoroughly check for consistent use of terms and formatting (choose one convention and use it consistently)
  • Hyphenate (or not) consistently: "email" or "e-mail"
  • Italicize (or not) consistently: "et al." or "et al."
  • Consistent punctuation: "e.g." or "e.g.," (use of comma tends to be American usage, no comma is British)
  • LaTeX macros for names use "\ " after the macro when followed by a space
• Avoid dangling "This": "This suggests..." → "This result suggests..."
• Check capitalization of proper names: VMWare → VMware, GMail → Gmail
• Avoid contractions in technical writing: "we've" → "we have"
• Footnote marks immediately follow punctuation (period, comma, semicolon, ...): "word⁵." → "word.⁵"     (CMOS 14.21)
• Using words as identifiers in LaTeX math mode typically results in awkward formatting since LaTeX treats each letter of the word as a separate variable and adds extra space in between letters. Use amsmath mode and \operatorname to format identifiers to fix this problem. Compare: $Server_1$ (S e r v e r₁) vs. $\operatorname{Server}_1$ (Server₁). If you need the word to be in italics, then use \text instead: $\text{\it Server}_1$ (Server₁).
• Acknowledgements
  • Thank people who helped
  • Thank shepherd (if you had one)
  • Thank reviewers
  • Ack grants, fellowships, other sources of funding
• Check all URLs in footnotes and bib entries (e.g., they can change between submission and camera ready)
• Finalize the bibliography
• Sort multiple citations: "[72, 64, 9]" → "[9, 64, 72]"
• Remove widows and orphans with judicious editing. Typically, you can remove one or two words, or substitute a synonym here or there, to fix bad breaks at the end of paragraphs. As a pleasant side effect, going through this process often removes words that turn out to be unnecessary and streamlines your writing.
• Spell check (again)