Trying to resubmit a paper to a different conference and realising rather late that the new lncs format (Springer single column) makes the article many pages longer than the previous two column ACM format. Fortunately Tim Love at Cambridge University Engineering Department has put together a page of hints for reducing the length of a LaTeX article. Here are the ones I found most helpful.
- Include the a4 package to reduce the size of the margins, works even if the page size is already a4.
- Allow LaTeX to fit more figures, tables and text onto a single page by redefining the *fraction commands and *counter values.
- Using \centering inside figure environments instead of \begin{center}… This seems to reduce space around figures.
- Use the abbrv bibliography style which only uses initials for first names.
- Shorten the names of proceedings, e.g., Proc. of EWSN. The year is unnecessary since it usually has its own field. Some journals also have standard abbreviations.
- For the anonymous version use \author{} and \institute{} instead of commenting out those lines. This will avoid the document reading ‘No Author Given’ and ‘No Institute Given’.