Friday, December 02, 2005

More random mumblings

The "standard" ACM conference style file is one of the most god-awfully ugly designs I have ever seen. Those who know me know that I like to obsess over nice fonts, and the clunky square font stylings that I am often forced to use just depress me.

On the other hand, SIGGRAPH (the graphics SIG of ACM) has an excellent style file, which often shows up in computational geometry proceeedings. I guess it's no surprise that the graphics folks are more sensitive to the layout and presentation of a paper.

Obviously, these are subjective judgements. So judge for yourself:

11 comments:

  1. SIGGRAPH is definitely prettier.

    I tend to use LLNCS for my own preprints, but that's not really directly comparable as it's a single-column style.

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  2. What's the reason for sans-serif fonts in titles (paper and section) in the siggraph style? Where is the elegance? 

    Posted by Anonymous

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  3. I agree that a good serif style would be great, but not the monstrosity that is the ACM style. As for the siggraph style, it has a certain spare elegance to it.  

    Posted by Suresh

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  4. I think it's clear that ACM style is out of the question for elegance, I was trying to focus on SIGGRAPH. Shouldn't there be some consistency requirement (unless there is a good reason for making things inconsistent --- I can't see any in this case) before a design is judged as good?

    BTW, who decides what the official ACM style is? Shouldn't there be some way of getting it changed? 

    Posted by Anonymous

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  5. My bugbear is the IEEE style:
    http://mocha-java.uccs.edu/ieee/ieeeftp/ieeecls.pdf
    For whatever reason, I just find it hideous. Mostly the section/subsection headings are ugly, and in Roman numerals (why?) so all my cross-references are to section IV.C or something equally inane.  

    Posted by Graham Cormode

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  6. I don't know who makes the ACM style. There was enough of a furore a few years ago when it was made over the "omission" of authors four and higher from the front page that they had to change that. The style seemed like a small thing at the time :)

    Although I don't like the style, that's hardly enough of a reason to go about changing it. You'd want someone who actually knows how to design a style to have something to do with it :) 

    Posted by Suresh

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  7. Which suggests that ACM would need to higher professional designers to redesign the style --- which is certainly doable. With the amount of complaining that goes on about it (and with the amount of pain and wasted time it causes every year), maybe a redesign wouldn't be such a bad idea? 

    Posted by Anonymous

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  8. You all haven't heard? The Computational Geometry Steering Committee approached ACM about using a LaTeX style of their own design in the SoCG proceedings. ACM's answer was--I'm paraphrasing a bit here--"Fuck you. We don't have time to listen to what you losers want. Now shut up and bend back over."

    The ACM style is not "ugly". The ACM proceedings style is vomitoriously wretched, diseased and nausea-inducing. I have not seen published material anywhere that comes close to this level of putrid slobbering. I find it hard to believe it is not a deliberate attempt to humiliate us and discredit our profession. There is no way the person who designed that .cls file could have made it that godawful by accident.

    The latest episode I've heard of is that Sheridan Printing has been ordered not to accept papers that use Jeff Erickson's "fixacm.sty" to tone down the most hideously embarrassing parts of the ACM style. Apparently, someone at ACM is not happy with just humiliating us a little; it's gotta be the full wringer.

    I think we should march into the ACM offices with guns loaded and force those bastards to show us a bare minimum level of respect, starting with allowing us to create our own proceedings style, one that isn't designed to throw away every fragment of dignity.

    I'm normally a mild guy, but ACM's arrogance and unwillingness to even discuss the issue demands action.

    Posted by Jonathan Shewchuk

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  9. Jeebus, and I thought I was being harsh ! that bit of backstory is interesting; why wasn't SIGGRAPH given the same short shrift ?
     

    Posted by Suresh

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  10. Why is SIGGRAPH not given the same short shrift?

    I don't know. But if I had to guess, I think figures like 48,000 people attending their conference  might enter into the debate.  

    Posted by Graham Cormode

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  11. I agree with Graham, IEEE conf. style is pretty annoying. I am also not happy with SIAM (J.Comput.) style. The theorems, lemmas, ... look very ugly.

    Which theory/math journal has the best styling ?

    Posted by Hung Q Ngo

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