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It is recommended to send a copy to an IEEE conference with the hyper-references activated?

This includes hyperlinks to sections, equations, tables, references, etc. The paper was written using LaTeX.

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    I don't know what conference you are submitting to, but in my experience most IEEE conferences state that you should remove any hyperlinks. Check the author information of your conference carefully. Sometimes this only applies to the final submission, not the submission for review. Here is an excerpt of some IEEE conference: "In a nutshell, here are the key points to create a good, compliant PDF file: Embed ALL fonts (subsetting or not, it doesn't matter) NO bookmarks NO form fields NO hyperlinks NO page numbering PDF version 1.4 (acrobat 5) or higher "
    – pschulz
    Apr 13, 2021 at 10:35
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    I’m voting to close this question because the only correct answer will be found in whatever instructions for authors was provided for the venue, or from your session chair. Anything coming from here will be no better than a guess. Apr 14, 2021 at 13:34

2 Answers 2

37

Yes, with a caveat: make sure that the hyperrefs don't include any information that can't be gleaned from the text itself. For example, a common mistake is to use \href to hide a URL, as in:

Our tool is available online \href{http://www.github.com/some/repo/}{here}.

This is acceptable on websites but not in a paper because if the paper is printed, the URL is not visible and impossible to recover. Similarly, this is bad:

As we showed \hypertarget{page1sec2}{earlier}, every Foo Bar is a Foo Baz

since it only displays the text "earlier", so an offline reader will have trouble following the backward reference. Generally, tools like cleveref (\Cref / \cref) do a better job of displaying something that is readable both in text and in interactive form.

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    Code Our tool is available on \href{http://www.github.com/some/repo/}{www.github.com//some/repo/} Apr 13, 2021 at 14:06
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    @BasileStarynkevitch - If you're going to show the URL, why not write -- much more simply -- \url{http://www.github.com/some/repo/}?
    – Mico
    Apr 13, 2021 at 18:22
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    Because I don't show the http: prefix Apr 13, 2021 at 18:23
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    @BasileStarynkevitch But you would avoid any possible errors and drift -- e.g., in your comment the text has two slashes but the link only has one. I don't know if that was intentional. If it is, will your coauthors remember it when they update the URL next week? Besides, the scheme is technically required to be a valid URL. Apr 14, 2021 at 1:27
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Yes: They help navigate the document. (Except if the conference forbids them, then no.)

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    Yes, it's very convenient. However, assuming you are the LaTeX hyperref package I would strongly suggest calling \hypersetup{colorlinks=true, unicode=true, linkcolor=[rgb]{0.10,0.05,0.67}, citecolor=[rgb]{0.10,0.05,0.67}, filecolor=[rgb]{0.10,0.05,0.67}, urlcolor=[rgb]{0.10,0.05,0.67}} or similar after importing, which replaces the ugly boxes with nice blue links (which is configurable in the above) instead - a lot more readable in my opinion. Check your conference guidelines of course.
    – orlp
    Apr 12, 2021 at 18:43
  • @orip: Insomuch good recommendation that I am thinking to ask the related question in tex.stackexchange and request to you to write this answer there to be found by search for others...
    – m123
    Apr 12, 2021 at 21:10
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    @m123 I think that question has already been answered on texSE dozens of times :) Apr 13, 2021 at 2:22
  • @orlp It might be a matter of taste but I prefer the boxes to the almost invisible links :). Apr 13, 2021 at 21:26

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