Apparently the specifications for the Allerton camera-ready copy insist on different page margins for the first page: 1 inch on top and 0.75 on the sides and bottom, whereas it’s 0.75 all around for the other pages. I submitted the paper and was told I had margin errors so I downloaded the draft copy and lo and behold I got an annotated PDF with gray boxes and arrows showing that every page had margin violations. How could that be, I thought?

It seemed that this is different than the default \documentclass[conference,letterpaper]{IEEEtran} options. After hacking around a bit I came across this hack but when I used \usepackage[showframe,paper=letterpaper,margin=0.75in]{geometry} the line-frames around each page showed that all of my text was inside the margins.

Either PaperCept is altering my PDF or it is not capable of calculating margins correctly, or the geometry package is not working. Given the problems I’ve had with PaperCept in the past, I’m guessing that it’s not the latter. My only hack was to use the geometry package to set the margins of all pages to 1 inch.

Did anyone else have these weird margin issues?

Update: Upon further checking, it appears that the margins enforced by PaperCept are not the margins for \documentclass[conference,letterpaper]{IEEEtran} but instead most likely for IEEEconf, which has (I believe) been deprecated. Yikes!

Update 2: This is, in fact, my fault, since the documentation says to use IEEEconf.cls. I am still confused as to why that’s the standard for Allerton. Also, this is the 2002 version of IEEEconf.cls, and there are even newer versions than that. Sigh.