I have wasted about 4 hours of my life now just trying to get the camera-ready copy of my paper uploaded to the IEEE website. They have an autoconvert-to-PDF script which will take my LaTeX/DVI files and convert them in theory. In reality, it spews horrible errors. There’s almost no documentation on how to make your LaTeX compliant other than vague warnings about Type 3 fonts, and when I emailed them I was told that my fonts were bad and pointed to a website which had no information on it regarding what to do if you have “bad fonts.”

So I’m left to debug my code using their autoconverter to the tune of around 5 minutes per test. I’ve been here a few hours, and just missed the curtain of a play I was going to see with Deb. Just now I “exceeded the quota” of allowable revisions. I thought that was the end, but then scrapped the whole submission and started a fresh one so I’m back to debugging now.

The deadline is midnight tonight.

My wrath cannot be compassed at this time.

Update (9:30 PM): Problems solved — there were two offending lines in the file, of the form \psline[linestyle=dashed](-40,40)(40,-40). Those are commands for the pstricks package, a set of postscript macros. IEEE doesn’t like the [linestyle=dashed] property. Once I worked around that the IEEE program would make a PDF, but with all of the large symbols missing. For example: integrals, sums, square roots, large delimiters like parentheses, and so on were all absent. As it turns out, the problem is that the IEEE program doesn’t like the package amsmath, which has a lot of little features and special characters that make life a lot easier when typesetting math. Total time spent: 6+ hours.

The paper is done now, but I am still full of ire.