Dear Joao, 

There are a few practical issues  that provide at least some reasons as to
the current quality of  formatting of design proceedings.

I'm saying this as someone who has been involved in the management of more
than a dozen conferences  involving designers and academics.

In practical terms, there is typically a huge overhead cost caused by
authors screwing up the formatting of papers submitted.

In the main this is due to in line ad-hoc editing of appearance by the
authors rather than them using styles for formatting.  In the past,
observing the submissions of many designers this appears to due to them
having more expertise in short document formatting using inline formatting,
rather than large document design using highly structured style models aimed
at automated document formatting that is needed for conference proceedings..

The result for the person compositing the papers into a final publication
document is a mess in which hidden ad-hoc styles emerge unexpectedly to
sabotage layouts and whole document formatting.

Secondly, conference organisers, unlike publishers have little control of
the visual shapes of the structure of individual papers.  A one word title
in one paper may be followed by a title in the next paper that requires
three or more  lines and cuts into other formatting structures.

Third, the best document formats for the donkeywork tasks  of reviewing,
commenting and tracking changes are often not the same formats that are
visually best for presentation of the polished documents. This is further
challenged by differences between best formats for visual aesthetics and
best formats for easy communication.

Fourth is that for many organisations running conferences or journals are
profit related and these organisations typically begrudge or refuse large
costs for reformatting from scratch a few hundred or thousand pages for a
small run document that offers little in the way of additional profit and is
hardly read after a few days. The large costs are often the reality due to
the problems with authors' widespread use of inline formatting and the wide
mix of document software that authors use.

Fifth, under cost pressures, the formatting of the proceedings is often
handed to administrative staff who are typically primarily skilled in
documents with low page numbers aimed at print rather than large page number
hyper-texted documents for online use.

Sixth is the need for responsive  online formatting for online publishing of
proceedings that also allows in-document hyperlinking, searching etc that in
many cases requires going beyond pdf. Put simply, fixed print layouts such
as pdf  are not now often the best layouts online. 

Seventh, is the need for the highest levels of similarity of document
editing software output across all authors, reviewers, programmers,
administrators etc.

Many of the above issues mean that  the emphasis first and most primarily be
place on document structure (a la SGML and variants such as html and xml)
rather than visual appearance (which in theory  can be sorted out later),
and on using Word as a standard document software and document output for
initial submissions and reviews.

For the above reasons, conference organisers typically specify the simplest
document formatting in the hope that authors will at least not make too many
difficulties by trying to format the appearance in ad-hoc ways that the
author feels might be best.

Myself when organising conferences, I try to reduce the styles to just ten
for each individual paper:  title, author & affiliation, subhead,
sub-subhead, body/normal, unordered list, ordered list, references,  block
quote, pageheader and pagefooter and with a specification as to what italics
and bold will be used for.

If authors format their documents using the styles provided, then some of
the conference  budget can be allocated to having a designer develop a final
formatted output that has a good visual aesthetic, follows  sound
communication  practices and is primarily adapted for online rather than
print environments.

Instead, however, in many cases, the problems of authors using in -line
adhoc formatting means that almost all papers are converted back to text and
reformatted from scratch to apply the standard style categories. This then
has used up so much of the budget  and time unnecessarily that there is very
little time or budget to have a visual designer  with expertise in long
documents work to correct the appearance.

It suggests the starting point  and the main gains are by ensuring that
authors have the competence, and the will to only use paragraph-level
styles, or are physically made unable to  change the appearance of the
document using in-line ad-hoc formatting.

Only then will it make much sense, for conferences at least, to fund
significant working input from graphic designers.

My experience as a publisher and graphic designer/typesetter of books,
especially those with multiple authors or containing collections of papers
has been much the same.

Improving the quality of document structure from authors seems to be the
necessary basis for improving the visual design of outputs of publications
in an economic manner.

Best wishes,
Terry

---
Dr Terence Love
PhD(UWA), BA(Hons) Engin. PGCEd, FDRS, AMIMechE, MISI
Director,
Love Services Pty Ltd
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks
Western Australia 6030
Tel: +61 (0)4 3497 5848
Fax:+61 (0)8 9305 7629
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--


 


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