Wednesday 24 April 2013

Writing an A4 size paper using the IEEEtran class

So here I was, trying to write an IEEE paper for a conference in Europe. As most of you might know, North America is probably the only place on Earth that doesn't use international standard. Usually, we use Letter size paper and things goes smoothly for me. But this time, I need to use A4 size. I followed the IEEEtran guide and changed the paper size to A4. Do you think that would work?

Of course, not!! (Latex is always so unnecessary complicated.) Whenever I use PDFTexify to compile my paper, it would always give me strange results, usually weird margins or the PDF file ended up to be Letter size. It took roughly 2 days to learn the trick to make my PDF file to be A4 because the IEEEtran guide only includes one sentence to give you hint where things might go wrong. So, I want to let everyone know how to solve this problem.

The steps are as follows (make sure you have specified in the documentclass that you want to use a4paper):
  1. First, use "Latex" to compile your TEX file instead of the PDF version Latex compiler. Note that if you were using the PDF version, you have to change all JPEG (or non-vector) pictures to EPS pictures. There are several tools out there to help you do this. Note that your output would be "dvi" file.
  2. Secondly, you want to add this line of code,"\special{pdf: pagesize width 210truemm height 297truemm}", right after the code "\begin{document}".
  3. Now, you use the compiler "dvipdf" (or dvipdfm) to produce your PDF file. It should produce the paper with the right paper size and right margin.
When you compile, make sure you use the default paper size of your TEX package (for example, MikTek) is selected to be "Letter". Using "A4" will give you weird margin. That's all I have. I am not a LATEX expert but I hope this helps!

If you have any questions, let me know and I will try my best to help. Even better, if you know the workaround for "PDFTexify", then please let me know!

4 comments:

  1. Thank you,It works. It helped me so much

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  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  3. That's very simple. just replace the class with
    \documentclass[conference, a4paper]{IEEEtran}
    It works for me.
    Cheers!

    ReplyDelete

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