The Best LaTeX Templates for IEEE, ACM, Springer and Nature (and How to Start in 30 Seconds)
Day 6 of writing daily about collaborative research writing
When we built LetX we assumed people would come for the collaboration. What they asked for, over and over, was templates. Not because they could not write a preamble, but because starting is the expensive part, and nobody wants to spend the first two hours of a submission hunting for the right class file.
Here is the template landscape for the venues that come up most, and the mistakes that cost people desk rejects.
IEEE
The IEEEtran class is the standard for IEEE conferences and transactions. The common mistake is using the conference variant for a journal or vice versa; the column widths and heading styles differ, and reviewers notice. Check whether your venue wants the conference or journal mode, and whether it is one of the venues that forbids changing the font size.
ACM
The acmart class with the right format option: sigconf for most conferences, acmsmall or acmlarge for journals. ACM is strict about the rights and CCS concept blocks, which the template generates for you if you fill in the metadata and will leave as ugly placeholders if you do not.
Springer
Two families: svjour3 for most journals and llncs for Lecture Notes in Computer Science proceedings. LNCS has a hard page limit and a very particular bibliography style; use the splncs04 style file that ships with the template rather than your usual one.
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Nature and the Nature family
Nature journals historically preferred Word for initial submission and accept LaTeX with the nature class for the typeset stage. Read the specific journal’s author guide, because the family is not uniform. The common mistake is agonising over Nature formatting for a first submission that will be read as a PDF regardless.
Elsevier
The elsarticle class with the preprint or review option for submission and a journal-specific option for the final. Elsevier’s double-column final format will reflow every figure you placed carefully in the single-column draft, so do not fine-tune figure placement until the format is final.
Theses, posters, grants, CVs
Your department’s thesis template is almost always a Word file or a PDF a senior student sent you. LaTeX versions exist for most large universities, often maintained by a graduate student who left. A library that has already collected and tested them is worth more than it sounds.
How to start in 30 seconds
In LetX, pick the venue from a library of 1,000+ templates, and the project opens with the class file, a compiling example document and the bibliography style the venue expects. You start on line one with your actual first sentence. Invite your co-authors; they get the same template with nothing to install.
Tomorrow, the last post of this first week: writing a thesis in LaTeX with an advisor who will never, ever open a terminal.
I build LetX, so the 30-second claim is about my own product and you should test it rather than believe it. If a venue you submit to has a template that is a trap, tell me in the comments and I will add it to the library notes.
