ACM Computing Surveys
28(4es), December 1996,
http://www.acm.org/surveys/Formatting.html. Copyright ©
1996 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. See the permissions statement below.
Formatting Computing Surveys Articles
for Electronic
Publication
A guide for authors
Jon
Doyle
Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Laboratory for Computer
Science
545 Technology Square, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
doyle@mit.edu,
http://www.medg.lcs.mit.edu/doyle
Abstract:
This file describes the proposed format for articles to appear in ACM
Computing Surveys Web pages. The file itself may be used as a
template for the format described. Please direct comments to the
author, and check for future revisions of the format.
Categories and Subject Descriptors: I.7.2 [Text Processing]:
Document Preparation - hyptertext/hypermedia; H.5.1
[Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Multimedia
Information Systems - Hypertext navigation and maps
General Terms: Design, Documentation, Languages
Additional Key Words and Phrases: Electronic publishing, style sheets,
formatting
1 General formatting instructions
Papers appearing in Computing Surveys may appear in several
formats. For instructions for preparing articles appearing in the
printed volumes, see the instructions at the Surveys web
site, http://www.acm.org/surveys/Authors.html. Eventually all papers
will be available in electronic form as well. This document describes
the format for papers appearing in electronic form, the first of which
appear in the December, 1996
issue. The sections below describe both the HTML encoding style, and
the citation scheme to be used to identify papers appearing in this
fashion. This file may be used as a template for formatting papers,
by replacing all the dates, URLs, and text components with ones
appropriate to the document to be formatted.
The preferred form for articles is as a single web page to simplify
printing of copies. If using LaTeX2HTML or comparable converters to
produce HTML from other formats, please use the appropriate settings
to get a single file as output (separate image files are acceptable).
Computing Surveys intends to prepare LaTeX formats suitable
for both paper publication and conversion into HTML form, but these
formats are still under development.
If preparing articles in HTML is not feasible, the fallback formats
are Adobe PostScript and PDF formats. In these cases, authors should
also submit originals in accordance with the ACM submission guidelines
described in http://www.acm.org/pubs/submitting_accepted_articles/auth_rd.htm,
so as to permit eventual conversion to HTML or other searchable
formats. Note that a number of document-preparation systems
(including Microsoft Word) now permit one to save documents in HTML
format directly.
Articles published by ACM, whether electronic or printed, will be
accompanied by a hypertext citation page, as evidenced by the
papers in the online tables
of contents. The URL used to refer to electronic publications
actually references the citation page; readers must follow the links
on that page to get available versions of the article proper. The
form of the URL used to refer to citation pages and articles is
assigned by ACM.
Articles appearing only in electronic form appear in "electronic
sections" of issues, such as the one appearing in Volume 28, Number
4es.
Articles may contain inline graphics, as described in the section on
figures and tables below. The text of the
paper should appear in black type on a white background (having
hypertext links appear in different colors is acceptable). Please do
not use multiple frames or active processes in papers. The general
guideline is that it should be straightforward to print a copy of the
paper faithfully (apart from the colors in inline graphics) on an
ordinary printer. Any active elements, such as demonstrations or the
like, should appear in separate documents referred to by the article.
The general structure for articles contains the following elements in
the following order:
The document should conform to basic HTML structuring conventions. In
particular, it should have a HEAD environment at the start, and the
document contents proper should be contained in a BODY environment. A
global HTML environment should contain both of these environments.
The primary contents of the HEAD environment is the TITLE environment.
Please give the document title in the form journal name : article
title. For example,
<TITLE>ACM Computing Surveys : Electronic Article Formats</TITLE>
is the title environment contained in this instruction document.
As seen on this document, the first element of the article indicates
the publication information, including the URL of the document and the
copyright information. The standard ACM copyright permissions paragraph appears at the
end of the document, with a link to this from the copyright notice at
the top of the document.
The title should be set using an HTML level 1 heading, i.e., using
<H1>. It should be centered. If it is long, it should be
broken into multiple lines (using <BR>) to achieve a
consistently pleasing appearance. Subtitles should be included in the
same heading, separated by a paragraph marker (<P>).
The author or authors should be listed in order below the title. Each
author should be described by four or more lines containing the
following information, when available:
Author Name
Affiliation/Organization
Mailing address including Country
Email address, Web address
Multiple authors should be separated by paragraph markers (<P>);
if several consecutive authors share the same address, their entries
may be combined, listing the author names separated by commas (e.g.,
John Doe, Jane Roe, and John Doe II), and combining their email
and Web addresses as appropriate using braces (e.g.,
{doe,roe,doe2}@domain.org). Both email addresses and web URLs should
be links, even if presented in condensed format. The email addresses
should be mailto links, while the URLs should be linked to
the URLs they express.
The abstract should be indented, and set off from the surrounding text
by blank lines and horizontal rules, as illustrated above. This
sample file uses the <blockquote> environment to
perform the indentation, and separates the abstract and keyword
components with paragraph markers (<P>). Please try to
keep abstracts short and in a single paragraph.
Articles generally should not include a table of contents.
When article length or other considerations make a table of contents
necessary, it should appear just after the abstract. If a contents
does appear, each entry in the table should have a hypertext link to
the corresponding heading in the body of the article.
Headings within the paper should be set as HTML headings of levels 2
through 6, i.e., using <H2> through <H6>. Set first level
headings using <H2>; generally, set level n headings
using <Hn+1>.
8.1 Section numbering
Each section should be numbered following the form used in these
instructions, e.g., separating section number, subsection number,
subsubsection number, etc. by periods.
8.2 Section anchoring
Ideally, each section heading should be defined as a hypertext anchor
as well, to ease traversing references in within the document and from
other documents. Short articles may skip this additional information,
at present. Longer articles may wish to include a table of contents,
in which case these anchors are very desirable.
Figures and tables should appear in the text at the place of their
mention (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. The ACM logo graphic.
Figures and tables should be anchors if distant portions of
the text refers to figure or table. These references may then contain
hypertext links back to the figure. Figures and tables should have
captions. Except when circumstances call for some other setting,
figures and tables should be centered, together with their captions.
HTML standards for tables do not exist at present, but either tables
constructed manually via preformatted text (<pre>) or Netscape
tables are acceptable. If using graphical images, please include size
information in the links (to permit text to display while the graphics
are transmitted) and alternate texts (for readers without graphics).
For example, the graphic appearing above is specified
with the link:
<IMG WIDTH=96 HEIGHT=95 ALT="ACM" SRC="http://www.acm.org/images/acmlogo.gif">
Do not use these size specifications to resize the
images from their natural sizes, as resizing does not work in some
browsers and can produce very bad results. If an image must be
resized, resize it prior to use in the paper, so that the size
specifications in the IMG link can refer to the new natural
size.
Footnotes should be marked in the text with numbers enclosed in
brackets, as in [1], with each footnote mark linked
to the appropriate footnote text. The footnote texts should be
grouped together at the end of the article, just before the
references. The footnote numbers should appear in bold font.
Citations should appear in the text in the form [Author Year]. These
should be linked to the appropriate entry in the references, or
failing that, to the start of the references.
11.1 Citing electronic publications
Citations to electronic publications should follow the guidelines in
the draft ACM
citations guide. An example appears in the publications
information at the top of this document, see also [Doyle 1996].
The references should be given in an unnumbered section titled
"References" appearing at the end of the document. Use the definition
list form (<DL>) for listing references. The citation keys
should appear in bold font. Each reference entry should be an anchor
if citations are to indicate the entry itself rather than the list of
references as a whole. The general form for reference entries follows
the standard
Computing Surveys style, but with some differences,
namely the separation of the citation tag to simplify hypertext
linking and online viewing.
Version information for the document should appear at the very end of
the document, specifying the date and time at which the document was
fixed (last changed) in content.
The acknowledgments should appear just after the main article text in an
unnumbered (but possibly anchored) section.
Any appendices should appear after the main text and acknowledgments,
with alphabetic section numbers.
A.1 Appendix subsections
Subsections of appendices should be numbered numerically.
- [1]
- The list of footnotes should use the definition list form with
the "compact" option
(<DL COMPACT>).
- [Doyle 1996]
- Doyle, J., 1996. Formatting
Computing Surveys Articles for Electronic
Publication: A guide for authors, Computing Surveys,
28, 4es (December),
http://www.acm.org/surveys/Formatting.html
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Last modified: Tue May 6 11:13:34 EDT 1997
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