LNCS Volume Editor Tools

A small set of tools that automate some of the more tedious parts of preparing an LNCS volume.

The conventions enforced by lncs are intended to comply with the LNCS guidelines for volume editors. If you find an inconsistency between lncs and the LNCS guidelines, please file a bug report.

Installation

You'll need to install Ruby 1.9 or later. I recommend doing so via rvm.

You can then install lncs via Ruby gems: gem install lncs

Get started with the lncs executable: lncs help

Recommended workflow

Download the submissions for your volume

Setup a working directory

> mkdir ecmfa2013
> cd ecmfa2013
> lncs init

Customise the manifest (e.g., set the path to the submissions, the volume number, ...)

> vi manifest.json
> cat manifest.json
{
  "volume_number": 7949,
  "sources": "/Users/louis/Downloads/submissions",
  "sections": [
    {
      title: "Foundations",
      papers: [7,11,14,18,20,24,35,46,63]
    },
    {
      title: "Applications",
      papers: [2,6,22,29,58,68]
    }
  ]
}

Unpack and inspect all of the submissions

> lncs inspect
> cd submissions
> ls -R

./ecmfa2013_submission_07:
7
./ecmfa2013_submission_07/7:
paper7.tex   paper7.pdf   copyright.pdf

./ecmfa2013_submission_24:
ECMFA2013-cameraready.pdf   ECMFA2013-cameraready.docx  copyright.pdf

Update the manifest with the paths to the PDF files of each paper

> vi manifest.json
> cat manifest.json
{
  "volume_number": 7949,
  "sources": "/Users/louis/Downloads/submissions",
  "sections": [
    {
      title: "Foundations",
      papers: [7,11,14,18,20,24,35,46,63]
    },
    {
      title: "Applications",
      papers: [2,6,22,29,58,68]
    }
  ],
  papers: {
    "7" : {
      pdf: "7/paper.pdf"
    },
    "24" : {
      pdf: "ECMFA2013-cameraready.pdf"
    }
  }
}

Check the status of the submissions

> lncs report
Foundations
007 -- 17pgs zip
011 -- 17pgs zip
014 -- 17pgs zip
018 -- 16pgs zip
020 -- 16pgs zip
024 -- 16pgs zip
035 -- 17pgs zip
046 -- 16pgs zip
063 -- 17pgs zip
Applications
002 -- 13pgs zip
006 -- 13pgs zip
022 -- 13pgs zip
029 -- 13pgs zip
058 -- 13pgs zip
068 -- 11pgs zip

If a submission exceeds your page limit, you may wish to contact the authors. If a submission is a PDF rather than a ZIP file, you may wish to do the same as you will need to send to Springer the sources and a signed copyright form for each submission.

Generate the set of directories required by Springer for the body of the proceedings

> lncs body
> ls body
79490001 79490020 79490054 79490086 79490119 79490152 79490178 79490204
79490003 79490037 79490070 79490102 79490135 79490165 79490191 79490217

> ls -R body/79490001
7

body/79490001/7:
paper7.tex   paper7.pdf   copyright.pdf

Generate the title pages used to construct the table of contents and author index

> lncs titles
> ls titles
0001.tex  0020.tex  0054.tex  0086.tex  0119.tex  0152.tex  0178.tex  0204.tex  index.tex
0003.tex  0037.tex  0070.tex  0102.tex  0135.tex  0165.tex  0191.tex  0217.tex

Run LaTeX to produce your PDF
```
> latex2pdf main.tex
> open main.pdf
```

Override any titles or names of authors (because, for example, lncs cannot extract title page information from MS Word source files).

> vi manifest.json
> cat manifest.json
{
  "volume_number": 7949,
  "sources": "/Users/louis/Downloads/submissions",
  "sections": [
    {
      title: "Foundations",
      papers: [7,11,14,18,20,24,35,46,63]
    },
    {
      title: "Applications",
      papers: [2,6,22,29,58,68]
    }
  ],
  papers: {
    "7" : {
      pdf: "7/paper.pdf",
      title: "MOCQL: A Declarative Language for Ad-Hoc Model Querying",
      authors: ["Harald St\\\"orrle"]
    },
    "24" : {
      pdf: "ECMFA2013-cameraready.pdf"
    }
  }
}

Regenerate your titles and PDF.

> lncs titles
> latex2pdf main.tex
> open main.pdf

Contributing

I'm afraid that this code is not well tested, factored or documented. It was quickly hacked together whilst in my first attempt to edit an LNCS volume. If I'm ever asked to edit a second volume, I plan to tidy up this gem and add a few more features. In the meantime, pull requests are very welcome.

Todo list:

Better error reporting when the titles key is specified but not authors and vice versa