1 min read

Conferences and Microsoft Word

Why do some conferences insist on things like Word documents for their single, only, primary submission format? It boggles the mind. At least you should be willing to accept print-ready PDFs or PostScript files instead. I just don't understand it. Does a printer scoff at you when you come with the book pre-rendered? I've not met one that minded. There are so many different tools for producing papers these days, with one of the best being the old standby, TeX. Why on earth would any technical conference not accept documents produced and rendered by TeX? I just don't get it. I can understand why some mostly non-technical people submitting some partly technical things to a conference might want to be able to do their work without having to learn something like TeX, which is understandable, but at least accept print-ready documents! Really!