AAAI Press Formatting Instructions For Authors Using LaTeX A Guide 2019
User Manual:
Open the PDF directly: View PDF 
.
Page Count: 4
AAAI Press Formatting Instructions
for Authors Using L
A
T
E
X — A Guide
Nathaniel Schleif, Andrew Maule, Harry Zhou, Stewart Kerr, Noah Stafford
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Abstract
AAAI creates proceedings, working notes, and technical re-
ports directly from electronic source furnished by the authors.
To ensure that all papers in the publication have a uniform ap-
pearance, authors must adhere to the following instructions.
Introduction
We need source and PDF files that can be used in a variety of
ways and can be output on a variety of devices. The design
and appearance of the paper is strictly governed by the aaai
style file (aaai19.sty).
Methods
The latest version of the AAAI style file is available on
AAAI’s website. Download this file and place it in the T
E
X
search path. Placing it in the same directory as the paper
should also work. You must download the latest version of
the complete AAAI Author Kit so that you will have the lat-
est instruction set and style file.
Methods Subsection
In the L
A
T
E
X source for your paper, you must place the fol-
lowing lines as shown in the example in this subsection. This
command set-up is for three authors. Add or subtract author
and address lines as necessary, and uncomment the portions
that apply to you. In most instances, this is all you need to
do to format your paper in the Times font. The helvet pack-
age will cause Helvetica to be used for sans serif. These files
are part of the PSNFSS2e package, which is freely available
from many Internet sites (and is often part of a standard in-
stallation).
Commands and Packages That May Not Be Used
Figures
Your paper must compile in PDFL
A
T
E
X. Consequently, all
your figures must be .jpg, .png, or .pdf. You may not use
the .gif (the resolution is too low), .ps, or .eps file format for
your figures.
Copyright c
2019, Association for the Advancement of Artificial
Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.
Figure 1: Using the trim and clip commands produces frag-
ile layers that can result in disasters (like this one from an
actual paper) when the color space is corrected or the PDF
combined with others for the final proceedings. Crop your
figures properly in a graphics program – not in LaTeX
When you include your figures, you must crop them out-
side of L
A
T
E
X. The command \includegraphics*[clip=true,
viewport 0 0 10 10]... might result in a PDF that looks great,
but the image is not really cropped. The full image can
reappear (and obscure whatever it is overlapping) when page
numbers are applied or color space is standardized. Figures
1, and 2 display some unwanted results that often occur.
How to do citations
Citations within the text should include the author’s last
name and year, for example (Newell 1980). Append lower-
case letters to the year in cases of ambiguity. Multiple au-
thors should be treated as follows: (Feigenbaum and Engel-
more 1988) or (Ford, Hayes, and Glymour 1992). In the case
of four or more authors, list only the first author, followed by
et al. (Ford et al. 1997).
Extracts
Long quotations and extracts should be indented ten points
from the left and right margins.
This is an example of an extract or quotation. Note the
indent on both sides. Quotation marks are not necessary
if you offset the text in a block like this, and properly
identify and cite the quotation in the text.
Table 1: Example table
\abovecaption \abovedisplay \addevensidemargin \addsidemargin
\addtolength \baselinestretch \belowcaption \belowdisplay
\break \clearpage \clip \columnsep
\float \input \input \linespread
\newpage \pagebreak \renewcommand \setlength
\text height \tiny \top margin \trim
\vskip{-\vspace{-
Figure 2: Adjusting the bounding box instead of a
ctually removing the unwanted data resulted multiple layers in this paper. It also needlessly increased the PDF size. In this
case, the size of the unwanted layer doubled the paper’s size, and produced the following surprising results in final production.
Crop your figures properly in a graphics program. Don’t just alter the bounding box.
Table 2: Example table 2
authblk babel caption cjk
dvips epsf epsfig euler
float fullpage geometry graphics
hyperref layout linespread lmodern
maltepaper natbib navigator pdfcomment
psfig pstricks t1enc titlesec
tocbind ulem
Footnotes
Avoid footnotes as much as possible; they interrupt the read-
ing of the text. When essential, they should be consecu-
tively numbered throughout with superscript Arabic num-
bers. Footnotes should appear at the bottom of the page, sep-
arated from the text by a blank line space and a thin, half-
point rule.
Section Headings. Sections should be arranged and
headed as follows:
Acknowledgments. The acknowledgments section, if in-
cluded, appears after the main body of text and is headed
“Acknowledgments.” This section includes acknowledg-
ments of help from associates and colleagues, credits to
sponsoring agencies, financial support, and permission to
publish. Please acknowledge other contributors, grant sup-
port, and so forth, in this section. Do not put acknowledg-
ments in a footnote on the first page. If your grant agency
requires acknowledgment of the grant on page 1, limit the
footnote to the required statement, and put the remaining
acknowledgments at the back. Please try to limit acknowl-
edgments to no more than three sentences.
References The references section should be labeled
“References” and should appear at the very end of the paper
(don’t end the paper with references, and then put a figure by
itself on the last page). A sample list of references is given
later on in these instructions. Please use a consistent format
for references. Poorly prepared or sloppy references reflect
badly on the quality of your paper and your research. Please
prepare complete and accurate citations.
Illustrations and Figures
Figures, drawings, tables, and photographs should be placed
throughout the paper near the place where they are first dis-
cussed. Do not group them together at the end of the pa-
per. If placed at the top or bottom of the paper, illustrations
may run across both columns. Figures must not invade the
top, bottom, or side margin areas. Figures must be inserted
using the \usepackage{graphicx}. Number figures sequen-
tially, for example, figure 1, and so on.
The illustration number and caption should appear under
the illustration. Labels, and other text with the actual illus-
tration must be at least nine-point type.
If your paper includes illustrations that are not compatible
with PDFT
E
X (such as .eps or .ps documents), you will need
to convert them. The epstopdf package will usually work
for eps files. You will need to convert your ps files to PDF
however.
L
A
T
E
X Overflow. L
A
T
E
X users please beware: L
A
T
E
X will
sometimes put portions of the figure or table or an equation
in the margin. If this happens, you need to scale the figure or
table down, or reformat the equation. Check your log file!
You must fix any overflow into the margin (that means no
overfull boxes in L
A
T
E
X). Nothing is permitted to intrude
into the margin or gutter.
The most efficient and trouble-free way to fix overfull
boxes in graphics is with the following command:
\resizebox{.9\columnwidth}!{ }
Using Color. Use of color is restricted to figures only. It
must be WACG 2.0 compliant. (That is, the contrast ratio
must be greater than 4.5:1 no matter the font size.) It must
be CMYK, NOT RGB. It may never be used for any portion
of the text of your paper. The archival version of your paper
will be printed in black and white and grayscale.The web
version must be readable by persons with disabilities. Con-
sequently, because conversion to grayscale can cause unde-
sirable effects (red changes to black, yellow can disappear,
and so forth), we strongly suggest you avoid placing color
figures in your document. If you do include color figures,
you must (1) use the CMYK (not RGB) colorspace and (2)
be mindful of readers who may happen to have trouble dis-
tinguishing colors. Your paper must be decipherable without
using color for distinction.
Drawings. We suggest you use computer drawing soft-
ware (such as Adobe Illustrator or, (if unavoidable), the
drawing tools in Microsoft Word) to create your illustra-
tions. Do not use Microsoft Publisher. These illustrations
will look best if all line widths are uniform (half- to two-
point in size), and you do not create labels over shaded ar-
eas. Shading should be 133 lines per inch if possible. Use
Times Roman or Helvetica for all figure call-outs. Do not
use hairline width lines — be sure that the stroke width of
all lines is at least .5 pt. Zero point lines will print on a laser
printer, but will completely disappear on the high-resolution
devices used by our printers.
Photographs and Images. Photographs and other images
should be in grayscale (color photographs will not reproduce
well; for example, red tones will reproduce as black, yellow
may turn to white, and so forth) and set to a minimum of 300
dpi. Do not prescreen images.
Resizing Graphics. Resize your graphics before you in-
clude them with LaTeX. You may not use trim or clip op-
tions as part of your \includegraphics command. Resize the
media box of your PDF using a graphics program instead.
Fonts in Your Illustrations You must embed all fonts in
your graphics before including them in your LaTeX docu-
ment.
References
The AAAI style includes a set of definitions for use in for-
matting references with BibTeX. These definitions make the
bibliography style fairly close to the one specified below.
To use these definitions, you also need the BibTeX style
file “aaai.bst,” available in the AAAI Author Kit on the
AAAI web site. Then, at the end of your paper but before
\enddocument, you need to put the following lines:
\bibliographystyle{aaai} \bibliography{bibfile1,bibfile2,...}
Please note that you are required to use
\bibliographystyle{aaai}for your references. You may
not use named, plain, apalike, acm, ieeetr, siam, chicago,
or any other style. Use of natbib is also not acceptable. (In
addition to natbib, the aaai19.sty file is also incompatible
with the hyperref and navigator packages. If you use
either, your references will be garbled and your paper
cannot be published.) If you used natbib commands, you
may put the following in your preamble (after removing
\usepackage{natbib}
\newcommand{\citet}[1]{\citeauthor{#1} \shortcite{#1}}
\newcommand{\citep}{\cite}
\newcommand{\citealp}[1]{\citeauthor{#1} \citeyear{#1}}
References may be the same size as surrounding text.
However, in this section (only), you may reduce the size to
\small if your paper exceeds the allowable number of pages.
Making it any smaller than 9 point with 10 point linespacing,
however, is not allowed. A more precise method of reducing
the size of your references is by means of the following com-
mand:
\fontsize{9.8pt}{10.8pt} \selectfont
You must reduce the size equally for both font size
and line spacing, and may not reduce the size beyond
{9.0pt}{10.0pt}.
The list of files in the \bibliography command should be
the names of your BibTeX source files (that is, the .bib files
referenced in your paper).
The following commands are available for your use in cit-
ing references:
\cite: Cites the given reference(s) with a full citation.
This appears as “(Author Year)” for one reference, or
“(Author Year; Author Year)” for multiple references.
\shortcite: Cites the given reference(s) with just the
year. This appears as “(Year)” for one reference, or
“(Year; Year)” for multiple references.
\citeauthor: Cites the given reference(s) with just the
author name(s) and no parentheses.
\citeyear: Cites the given reference(s) with just the
date(s) and no parentheses.
Formatted bibliographies should look like the following
examples.
Book with Multiple Authors
Engelmore, R., and Morgan, A. eds. 1986. Blackboard Sys-
tems. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.
Journal Article
Robinson, A. L. 1980a. New Ways to Make Microcircuits
Smaller. Science 208: 1019–1026.
Magazine Article
Hasling, D. W.; Clancey, W. J.; and Rennels, G. R. 1983.
Strategic Explanations in Consultation. The International
Journal of Man-Machine Studies 20(1): 3–19.
Proceedings Paper Published by a Society
Clancey, W. J. 1983. Communication, Simulation, and Intel-
ligent Agents: Implications of Personal Intelligent Machines
for Medical Education. In Proceedings of the Eighth Inter-
national Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 556–
560. Menlo Park, Calif.: International Joint Conferences on
Artificial Intelligence, Inc.
Proceedings Paper Published by a Press or Publisher
Clancey, W. J. 1984. Classification Problem Solving. In Pro-
ceedings of the Fourth National Conference on Artificial In-
telligence, 49–54. Menlo Park, Calif.: AAAI Press.
University Technical Report
Rice, J. 1986. Poligon: A System for Parallel Problem Solv-
ing, Technical Report, KSL-86-19, Dept. of Computer Sci-
ence, Stanford Univ.
Dissertation or Thesis
Clancey, W. J. 1979. Transfer of Rule-Based Expertise
through a Tutorial Dialogue. Ph.D. diss., Dept. of Computer
Science, Stanford Univ., Stanford, Calif.
Forthcoming Publication
Clancey, W. J. 2020. The Engineering of Qualitative Models.
Forthcoming.
Proofreading Your PDF
Please check all the pages of your PDF file. Is the page size
A4? Are there any type 3, Identity-H, or CID fonts? Are all
the fonts embedded? Are there any areas where equations
or figures run into the margins? Did you include all your
figures? Did you follow mixed case capitalization rules for
your title? Did you include a copyright notice? Do any of
the pages scroll slowly (because the graphics draw slowly
on the page)? Are URLs underlined and in color? You will
need to fix these common errors before submitting your file.
Additional Resources
L
A
T
E
X is a difficult program to master. If you’ve used
that software, and this document didn’t help or some
items were not explained clearly, we recommend you read
Michael Shell’s excellent document (testflow doc.txt V1.0a
2002/08/13) about obtaining correct PS/PDF output on
L
A
T
E
X systems. (It was written for another purpose, but it has
general application as well). It is available at www.ctan.org
in the tex-archive.
Acknowledgments
AAAI is especially grateful to Peter Patel Schneider for his
work in implementing the aaai.sty file, liberally using the
ideas of other style hackers, including Barbara Beeton. We
also acknowledge with thanks the work of George Ferguson
for his guide to using the style and BibTeX files — which
has been incorporated into this document — and Hans Gues-
gen, who provided several timely modifications, as well as
the many others who have, from time to time, sent in sug-
gestions on improvements to the AAAI style.
