Frequently Asked Questions about IEEE's Electronic Submission Requirements

The following are questions and answers drawn from IEEE staff dialogue with users of the requirements posted on the Conference Submission Standards page. These requirements include:

• "Requirements for Creating PDF Documents for IEEE Xplore®,"
• "IEEE Packing List Specification for Conference Proceedings" and
• "IEEE Publication Types for Conference Proceedings."

We periodically add to this FAQ, primarily by answering questions submitted to the alias, pdfsupport@ieee.org,or call +1 732 465 5888.

Q. Why has the IEEE adopted these requirements?
A. To date, IEEE Xplore®, the IEEE's online premier delivery system, has presented conference proceedings as bitmapped images scanned from print. Distilled PDF has been selected as the required format because it presents significant quality improvements over scanned PDF. Font display is sharper, charts and photos can be shown in their original colors, and distilled PDF documents can be searched using Adobe Acrobat's built-in text-finding feature. These quality improvements add value to proceedings delivered through IEEE Xplore®, which is visited by more than 24,000 researchers daily.

Q. What are the necessary steps to include my conference record in IEEE Xplore®?
A. First, you must have a Letter of Acquisition from the IEEE Conference Publications Department. Second, prepare your conference record according to the IEEE Xplore® requirements posted on the Conference Submission Standards page. Third, copy completed PDFs to a CD and ship it to the IEEE address provided in your Letter of Acquisition. E-mail any questions about delivery of the material to the Conference Publications Product Management Group.

Q: Which PDF versions are supported?
A: The content provider is required to make any PDF version 1.5 files (Acrobat 6) compliant with the PDF specification. PDF files must be compatible with PDF version 1.4 (Acrobat 5) or earlier.

Q. What is the most common error found in files that fail to meet IEEE Xplore® compliance requirements?
A. The failure to embed all fonts is by far the most common error found in distilled PDF files submitted to IEEE Xplore®. The PDF requirement specifies in Section 7.2 that the following items are to be selected (i.e., checked) in the Adobe Acrobat Distiller "Fonts" tab:

1. Embed All Fonts
2. Subset All Embedded Fonts Below 100%

Q. In order to minimize file sizes, can we assume that certain fonts are standard (such as Times Roman, etc.)?
A. Minimizing file size is important, but takes second place in a trade-off with universality in viewing technical content such as the IEEE publishes. To ensure that the IEEE has an "archival" copy of an electronic file, the file must be able to stand alone without assumption of what fonts might be standard in the viewing software. There is a definite need to embed and subset all the fonts that an author might use. Experience shows that we may not assume that the global community of authors submitting manuscripts to IEEE conferences uses a constant, standard set of fonts. Even in Microsoft Word, for instance, base fonts vary from one version to another, varying in some cases by global region (the so-called "Asian font problem"). If font options are selected as displayed in 2.3 of the requirements ("Font Options"), that submission should be compliant.

Q. How can an individual user check to be sure that he or she has properly embedded fonts?
A. We can suggest the following manual process that allows Adobe Acrobat users to check for font embedding:

1. Under the View menu, be sure that "use local fonts" is not checked.
2. On the Print panel, check "Print to file". This will cause Acrobat to try to assign fonts to all the fonts in the document.
3. Go to Document Properties > Fonts
4. Click on the "list all fonts" button
5. In the Font Info panel the first column gives the original font name and the second gives the font type (i.e., Type 1 or TrueType). The third column is not relevant to this check. In the fourth column ("Used Font"), it should say "Embedded Subset". The fifth column ("Type") must match the second column.

Q. Does the presence of errors mean that the file cannot be uploaded to Xplore®?
A. Noncompliant files cannot be used in Xplore®. In the event that any files are non-compliant, we will attempt to obtain compliant files from the conference. If we are unable to obtain compliant files, we will have to scan a paper version of the final published document to create a PDF. The scanned version will likely not be of the same high quality as the distilled version.

Q. Are you able to process these "errored" files to make them compatible?
A. No. Files must be compatible from the start. Any missing font information cannot be interpolated from the limited information already in the existing PDF file. Therefore, the specification requires the user to embed all fonts, including base fonts. This important step will avert the most common compatibility error.

Q. What are the minimum compatibility requirements (if any)?
A. The IEEE PDF specifications establish the minimum requirements and instruct users on the settings to use to create acceptable PDFs using Adobe Acrobat. All conferences are free to supply files of higher resolution.

Q. On page 1 of the Packing List Requirement, under item 2.1, should the sequential number correspond to the sequential number described on page 3? If so, could the numbers 1-9 be written as 01, 02, etc. (rather than 1, 2, etc.) so that the files show up in the correct order in file list view? If there are more than 100 items, can we use numbering of 001, 002, etc. for the same reason?
A. There is no requirement to pad the sequence number with zeroes. It is acceptable to do so, however.

Q. On page 2 of the Packing List Requirement, for the yes/no field of distilled PDF file, is a PDF created by a form other than Adobe Acrobat Distiller (for example PDFWriter or createpdf.adobe.com) also to be regarded as "distilled" in this context?
A. The yes/no field of distilled PDF files is meant to identify files that were created using Acrobat Distiller only. The purpose of the field is to identify if the text is searchable/extractable or not. If it is, then we do not need to re-key the abstracting and indexing terms. This helps ensure the accuracy of the data in IEEE Xplore®.

Q. Our conference authors and volunteers really don't have the time to handle these files. How can we get this done?
A. File conversion to PDF is a process best conducted by a qualified vendor working with authors' application files. The vendor selected to produce a conference records should review the IEEE Xplore® requirements and confirm its capability to deliver an Xplore®-compliant package of files. The editors of the IEEE Conference and Custom Publishing Department are trained and equipped to meet these requirements using Conference eXpress, an automated manuscript submission that converts author files and returns a proof to authors for approval. For more information, e-mail conferencepublishing@ieee.org or visit the department's web site at www.ieee.org/conferencepublishing.