DRS2008 » styles explanation

Using Paragraph Styles to control the appearance of your paper.

We have had some questions about formatting of conference papers. This is a little confusing and it is difficult to explain if you don't normally work in this way but the points below should help. To make things easier, you may also download and use this template:

DRS08 paper template.doc

we have indicated that you should use various paragraph styles such as "Title", "Heading 1", "Heading 2" etc to control the appearance of your paper. These styles are a normal feature of Microsoft Word .
we have NOT said what font, size, style or spacing to use. Our example uses a particular set of styles based on the Arial font but that is just an example and the final layout of the published papers may be different.
if you use paragraph styles in this way your paper may not look the same as our example but that is not important as long as it is easy to read.
the important thing is the style settings allow us to control the appearance of the final document no matter how it looks now. We can copy it into our template and your text will change to match our versions of these styles. (To old guys like me who did graphic design before computers this is pure magic)
NOTE: if you want to change the appearance of your draft paper please do it by altering the style formatting, NOT by formatting the text directly. If you are unsure how to do this I suggest you get advice from a colleague or tutor who is familiar with Microsoft Word.
If you are not using Microsoft Word, most word processors will define styles in a similar way and export the document as an RTF (Rich Text Format) file which is suitable for us.
NOTE: If you have been using 'Markup' view to keep track as you edit your paper, please remember to turn this OFF when you've finished and to ensure that you save your paper in 'normal' view. Otherwise the reviewers can see all the bits you edited out of your final version.

This is a lot of detail and it may be confusing if you are used to doing things your own way. The reason is to allow us to produce well-formatted proceedings without excessive editing costs.