Is it necessary to submit papers to IEEE conference which are PDF Express Plus approved?

Question

I submitted one of my papers to an IEEE conference: NGCT 2015 which is supposed to be happening soon (the final paper submission deadline is gone) and I had submitted my paper in PDF format, written in latex, without getting it approved using PDF express plus.

Is it necessary that I should have submitted the PDF express plus paper? If yes, do I still have an option of changing the submitted paper?

I tried contacting the conference organizers but they were unreachable for quite sometime now.

Answer 1

PDF Express is basically an automated means of making sure that you didn't mess up your document preparation in a way that will later become a headache for you, the conference organizers, or the IEEE. For example, you might have things misconfigured such that you ended up with A4 instead of US Letter paper, or have some bad fonts in there. If you're using the standard IEEE LaTeX templates and not doing anything particularly creative with your formatting this shouldn't happen, but even then sometimes it does.

The IEEE camera-ready sites will typically tell you that you are required to check beforehand, but de facto allow you to submit. This is sometimes very important, because sometimes PDF Express isn't working (we had an issue of this type with a conference earlier this summer). Checking with PDF Express is a good practice to follow, however, because it's a few seconds of insurance against the possibility of a whole bunch of headache for yourself and others down the line.

Answer 2

You can indeed avoid using PDF Express. I have on one occasion submitted an IEEE conference paper that was not checked with PDF Express, and that was published without problems. However, you should make sure to:

1. Read the instructions for authors very carefully. Make sure you use the right font size, paper size, column layout etc. Also make sure you use the correct options for the IEEE LaTeX template.
2. Check that your fonts have been embedded properly. On Linux the pdffonts command lets you do this. (It's OK to have fonts embedded as subsets.) On Windows, Google is your friend, but I think some versions of Adobe Reader can check it.
3. Make sure any figures are of appropriate resolution: good enough to look crisp, but not so huge that you get a 50 MB PDF. As a rule of thumb, you want a full-width figure to be ~ 2000 pixels wide for single column layouts. This is approximately what is called 300 DPI. For line graphs, vector graphics (like .eps) are always best.