Improve typesetting and save space in your submissions, who does not want that?

Preamble

An academic paper is not just a messenger of hopefully ground-breaking results, but also a story and a visual manifesto. If it’s badly-formatted, there are dangling words in almost empty lines, inconsistent notation, readers might give up with reading. On the other side, if everything is nice but this results in a too-long article, then besides risking a desk-rejection (or the payment of extra fees for exceeding the page limit), readers will be less enthusiastic about facing so much text. Your results can be fascinating, if no one reads them, you failed your goal.

There are several best practices to ensure that your submission looks professional, eases the reader’s task, and fits into the page limit. I will assume that you are using LaTeX (you should), and provide my two cents on what I found especially useful.

Typesetting

You want that your text looks great and saves space. This is how you do it.

Fighting almost-empty lines

When the last few words of a sentence start a new line, it will look awkward and will waste you a lot of space. The solution is to instruct LaTeX to squeeze the words together a bit. This can be done with the command \looseness-1 what you place in front of a paragraph and enjoy the result.

Keeping in-text equations together

Equations should be kept together, i.e., they should not be spread across lines when provided in-text. The easy fix is to but curly braces around them. So $y=f(x)$ can be split, but ${y=f(x)}$ cannot.

More compact fractions

In-text fractions can take up lot of space and destroy the homogeneity of the paragraph by requiring more space between lines. A possible solution is using \usepackage{nicefrac} and the \nicefrac{}{} command, which will save you space.

More compact lists

Both the enumerate and itemize environments waste a lot of space between lines by default. So much space also suggests less coherence of the items in the list. With the nolistsep option, the spacing between lines is reduced—the leftmargin=* option will save some more space by starting the items right at the left (pun intended).

\begin{itemize}
    % [nolistsep]
    [nolistsep,leftmargin=*]
    \item ...
    \item ...
\end{itemize}

Appendix-only table of contents

Conference submissions practically do not allow the inclusion of a table of contents due to the page limit, but it can be helpful for the appendix. This can be done in the following way:

% ----------------------
%% include in preamble
\usepackage[toc,page,header]{appendix}
\usepackage{minitoc}

% akes the "Part I" text invisible
\renewcommand \thepart{}
\renewcommand \partname{}

% ----------------------
%% include in the appendix
\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{Appendix} % Add the appendix text to the document TOC
\part{Appendix} % Start the appendix part
\parttoc % Insert the appendix TOC

References

LaTeX has commands such as \eqref{}, \autoref{}, \ref{} that work fine, though what I started to like recently is the cleveref package with its \cref{} command, as it enables redefining the name Latex uses when referencing a table, figure, or section. For example, if you would like to change referencing sections to print out “section” with an upper-case “S”, then then use the following command (the third set of curly braces is used to define the plural).

All you need is include this script.

\usepackage{cleveref}

\crefname{section}{Section}{Sections}

Backlinks for references for simpler navigation

It can be annoying when clicking on a reference means that somehow we need to navigate back to the same spot. Loading hyperref as \usepackage[backref=page]{hyperref} will show the page numbers for each reference they were cited at. For they are active links, going back to the original line cannot be more straightforward.

Restating theorems

When using environments for theorems, remarks, and co, it can be useful to restate them in the appendix to avoid the back-and-forth to the main text. Simply copy-pasting is not a good solution as that way a different number will be assigned to the second appearance of the same claim. With the thmtools package, there is a solution for this:

\usepackage{amsthm} % to have theorem environments in the first place
\usepackage{thmtools,thm-restate}


\newtheorem{thm}{Theorem}

\begin{restatable}{thm}{nameofthm}
This is true.
\end{restatable}


\nameofthm* % this will repeat the theorem with the same number

Referencing items in a list

If you need to reference an item in a list (a common use-case is referring to e.g. claims of a theorem), the enumitem package can help you:

\usepackage{enumitem}
\usepackage{cleveref}

\newlist{nameofenumeration}{enumerate}{2} % define enumeration type
\setlist[nameofenumeration]{label={\normalfont(\roman*)},ref=\thetheorem(\roman*)} % setup the label, it will include the number of theh theorem
\crefname{nameofenumerationi}{property}{properties} % cleverref config

\begin{theorem}
  Theorem comes here with claims:
  \begin{nameofenumeration}
    \item property one \label{prop:1}
    \item property two \label{prop:2}
  \end{nameofenumeration}
\end{theorem}

Figure placement

A single figure will waste a lot of placed if put into e.g. a figure environment. A possible solution is to use the wrapfig package, which lets LaTeX to arrange text around the figure.

\usepackage{wrapfig}

\begin{wrapfigure}{r}{6.5cm}
\centering
    \includegraphics[height=7em,width=\textwidth
		]{figures/fig.png}
    \caption{Caption}
    \label{figure:fig}
\end{wrapfigure} 

Notation, glossary

It’s good practice to organize notation and abbreviation into a system. So if you need to change how you denote the input, you only need to do it at a central place.

Notation

I have a separate .tex file for all my abbreviations including concepts such as KL Divergence or the ELBO. All these can be defined with the \newacronym{}{}{} command, where the three arguments are:

1. The name you refer to the abbreviation,
2. Abbreviation short form,
3. The abbreviation written out.

\newacronym{ml}{ML}{Machine Learning}

From this point on, \gls{ml} will print out Principal Component Analysis(PCA) for the first use, then only PCA.

• If you need the plural, use \glspl{ml},
• For forcing the short version \acrshort{ml},
• For forcing the long version \acrlong{ml},
• For forcing the full (i.e., both the name spelled out and the abbreviation) version \acrfull{ml}.

Besides enforcing consistency, a list of acronyms can be created with the \printacronyms command—as a bonus, the acronyms will be cross-referenced, sop clicking on them will lead you to the list of acronyms. Handy, isn’t it?

Glossary

Notation is a crucial tool to refer to concepts in a short form and to formalize ideas. consistency is key here too. Fortunately, the glossaries package does this for us: we can organize notation into categories, then print them out such that the reader will be able to click on them and get reminded what we use the formula for.

This is what you need to include:

\usepackage[acronym, automake, toc, nomain, nopostdot, style=tree, nonumberlist]{glossaries}
\usepackage{glossary-mcols} % to have multiple columns
\setglossarystyle{mcolindex}


%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
% Glossary
\newglossary{abbrev}{abs}{abo}{Nomeclature} %abs and abo are file extensions LaTeX will use internally for this set of formulas -- different glossaries should have different ones
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

% Top-level glossary entries
\newglossaryentry{lr}{
    name        = \ensuremath{\alpha} ,
    description = {learning rate} ,
    type        = abbrev,
}


% A separate category for mathematics, this will render all related notation 
% under a "Maths"" header
\newglossaryentry{math}{type=abbrev,name=Maths,description={\nopostdesc}}


\newglossaryentry{cov}{
    name        = \ensuremath{\Sigma} ,
    description = {covariance matrix} ,
    type        = abbrev,
    parent      = math,
}

For referencing the the above entries, the same \gls{} command is used as for acronyms. The list of notation can be included by invoking the \printglossary[type=abbrev, style=tree] command (this will use a hierarchical style). When including \setglossarysection{subsection} then both glossary and acronyms will be at the subsection level.

The resulting structure will be:

Nomenclature
  - $\alpha$ learning rate
  Maths
    - $\Sigma$ covariance matrix

If the glossaries are not showing up (especially if you are on Overleaf), check whether the files are in a folder (common when uploading a .zip). If yes, move everything out of the folder.

Fixing hyperref warnings

When using \gls{}, \glspl{}, \acrshort{}, \acrlong{}, \acrfull{} in a caption, hyperref will warn about Token not allowed in a PDF string. To fix this, we can redefine these commands as

\pdfstringdefDisableCommands{\def\gls#1{<#1>}%
  \def\glspl#1{<#1>}%
  \def\acrshort#1{<#1>}%
  \def\acrlong#1{<#1>}%
  \def\acrfull#1{<#1>}%
}

to get rid of the warning and have more meaningful bookmarks in the pdf.

Speeding up compilation time

Working on a large project with lot of files and figure can result in you sitting in front of your monitor and reading War and Peace before you can start handling the error messages. \includeonly comes for the rescue, as it restricts the files processed by the compiler only to the specified ones(no leading or trailing spaces allowed).

\includeonly{a.tex,b.tex}

Acknowledgements

I learned lot of the tricks in this post from Luigi Gresele and Julius von Kügelgen.