Author's Guide

General Remarks

These instructions are aimed at making the editing of the book as little an effort as possible both for the authors and the editors. Since many people will contribute with their LaTeX sources, and since everyone has his own style of typesetting, some collisions are likely. The guidelines should help avoiding them.

To setup the files, gunzip and untar the file lmc.tar.gz in a directory. You will only have to edit the files in the /sample subdirectory. This is where your paper should go. You will not have to change any other file at all, since everything else will be taken care of by the editors. You may, however, if you want, edit the file book.tex to include your names and the list of authors in the corresponding chapter entry.

Please have a look at the file intro/intro.tex regarding the notation. This notation is imperative in order to provide a consistent unified access to all the work. It may not always be your favourite symbols, but using different notation in all the chapters would make the book hard to read.

Please have a look at the macros defined in book.tex. They should make formatting much easier (there are macros for marginal notes, theorems, equations, sections, etc.).

We will provide an introductory chapter shortly. This will make it easier for you to start with the novel aspects of your work without having to write a mini introduction yourself.

All this said, we would ask you to abide by the following ten rules to avoid unnecessary

The Ten Commandments of Good LaTeX

1. Thou shalt not use \def or \renewcommand at all. Use \newcommand instead.

2. Thou shalt not redefine page properties in the file (e.g. \textheight, \pagestyle, \thispagestyle, \baselineskip).

3. Thou shalt not use \displaystyle in the text. LaTeX knows the righteous way to adjust things.

4. Thou shalt not try to do nifty tricks to change the way LaTeX does linespacing by adding lines like \vspace{1cm}. Your paper will look ugly otherwise.

5. Thou shalt not use exotic packages for images. Use encapsulated Postscript (.eps) to make yourself and the editors happy.

6. Thou shalt not use \paragraph since MIT Press does not like this command.

7. Thou shalt use references / labels instead of explicit numbering. Hence use \eq{eq:SBSS:myequation} instead of (6.6.6).

8. Your labels shall be meaningful and unique. To achieve this goal create a key from the first letters of the authors (e.g. SBSS for Smola, Bartlett, Schölkopf, and Schuurmans) and include it in the label.

   1. \label{sec:SBSS:mysection} for a section

   2. \label{eq:SBSS:myequation} for an equation

   3. \label{th:SBSS:mytheorem} for a theorem

9. Thou shalt use BibTeX instead of handcrafted citation systems. The natbib package is the best thing since sliced bread. It does

   1. \cite{SmoBarSchSch99} expands into Smola et al., 1999

   2. \cite*{SmoBarSchSch99} expands into Smola, Bartlett, Schölkopf, and Schuurmans, 1999

   3. \cite[]{SmoBarSchSch99} expands into [Smola et al. 1999]

   4. \cite*[]{SmoBarSchSch99} expands into [Smola, Bartlett, Schölkopf, and Schuurmans 1999]

10. Thou shalt use meaningful BibTeX keys. Otherwise BibTeX will be evil, mean, and include possibly several citations of the same paper in the book. The editors will hate you eternally for that. Hence use combinations of each of the first three characters of each of the authors plus the year (not Y2K compliant) to generate the keys. Hence your bibtex entries should look like:

      @book{SmoBarSchSch99,
      author = {A.J.~Smola and P.~Bartlett and B.~{Sch\\"olkopf} and C.~Schuurmans},
      title = {Advances in Large Margin Classifiers},
      publisher = {MIT Press},
      address = {Cambridge, MA},
      year = 1999
      }