Simplified LNCS Template

Quick start for modern LaTeXing with LNCS.

To build the whole document, execute following command. Note that this requires a working perl installation.

latexmk paper

In case something goes wrong, you can instruct the LaTeX compiler to stop at the first error:

pdflatex paper

Benefits

Following features are enabled in this template:

• Provides a skeletal paper.tex file
• Example to have an image being placed right to a text
• (Optional) Automatic setting of “Fig.” and “Section”/”Sect.” according to the LNCS style. Just use \Cref{sec:xy} at the beginning of a sentence and \cref{sec:xy} in the middle of a sentence. Thanx to cleveref.
• Sharper font (still compatible with Springer’s requirements).
• (Optional) Typesetting of listings using advanced highlighting powered by the minted package.
• Generated PDF allows for copy and paste of text without getting words with ligatures such as “workflow” destroyed. This is enabled by glyphtounicode, which encodes ligatures (such as fl) using unicode characters.
• Support of hyperlinked references without extra color thanx to hyperref.
• Better breaking of long URLs.
• Support for \powerset command.
• (Optional) Support todos as pdf annotations. This is enabled by the pdfcomment package.
• microtypographic extensions for a better look of the paper.
• Modern packages such as microtype, cleveref, csquotes, hyperref, hypcap, upquote, natbib, booktabs.
• (Optional) LaTeX compilation using the modern lualatex compiler.
• Ready-to-go configuration for latexindent.

Disabled features

Following features were not activated for this template. You can run the latex template generator to enable the features.

Hints on writing an abstract and thesis by Dirk Fahland.

Examples

• paper.pdf - normal paper.
• paper-minted.pdf - paper showing minted in action.
• paper-newtx.pdf - paper typeset in Times Roman to save some space.
• paper-minted-newtx.pdf - paper typeset in Times Roman to save some space.

Background

The official template is available at https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines –> “Templates, samples files & useful links” –> “LaTeX2e Proceedings Templates (zip)” Deep link: ftp://ftp.springernature.com/cs-proceeding/llncs/llncs2e.zip.

Quick start

• Click on Download ZIP or here.
• Extract LNCS-main.zip in the folder where you want to write your paper.
• Edit paper.tex.
• latexmk paper.

When using on overleaf, you have to add the file llncs.cls manually:

1. Navigate to “Add Files”
2. Select “From External URL”
3. Paste https://latextemplates.github.io/stys-for-overleaf/llncs.cls into the field “URL to fetch the file from”
4. Click “Create”

As you see on GitHub actions, the paper compiles out of the box. There is no need to adjust the packages or to remove some of them. This might lead to undesiered results such as hyperlinks not working any more or no good microtypographic features. In case you think, a package needs to be altered or added, feel free to open an issue.

Tool hints

There is currently no official biblatex support. A first step towards that is done at biblatex-lncs.

MiKTeX installation hints are given at http://latextemplates.github.io/scientific-thesis-template/#installation-hints-for-windows.

• Grammar and spell checking is available at TeXstudio. Please download LanguageTool (Windows: choco install languagetool) and configure TeXstudio to use it. Note that it is enough to point to languagetool.jar. If TeXstudio doesn’t fit your need, check the list of all available LaTeX Editors.
• Use JabRef to manage your bibliography (Windows: choco install jabref).

To have minted running properly, you have to do following steps on Windows:

1. Install python: choco install python - that uses chocolatey to install Python
2. Install pygments: pip instal pygments - that uses the Pyhton package manager to install the pygments library
3. When latexing, use -shell-escape: pdflatex -shell-escape paper. You can also just execute latexmk paper.

Usage with docker

The generated Dockerfile is based on the Dockerfile by reitzig. The idea of that system is to host the document sources in a directory separated from the output directory.

docker run --rm -v "c:\users\example\latex-document:/work/src" -v "c:\users\example\latex-document\out:/work/out" ltg work latexmk

Following one-time setup is requried:

docker build -t ltg .

FAQs

Q: ShareLaTeX outputs a warning regarding the llncs class

ShareLaTeX might output following warning:

LaTeX Warning: You have requested, on input line 8, version 2018/03/10’ of document class llncs, but only version 2004/08/17 v2.14 LaTeX document class for Lecture Notes in Computer Science’ is available.

The reason is that you did not use llncs.cls from a recent llncs2e.zip (which can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.springernature.com/cs-proceeding/llncs/llncs2e.zip), but a copy from somewhere else. Please use the latest version offered by Springer.

Q: How can I synchronize updates from the template to my repository?

1. Initialize your git repository as usual
2. Add this repository as upstream: git remote add upstream https://github.com/latextemplates/LNCS.git
3. Merge the branch upstream/main into your main branch: git merge upstream/main.

After that you can use and push the main branch as usual. Notes on syncing with the upstream repository are available from GitHub.

Q: I get the error ! pdfTeX error (font expansion): auto expansion is only possible with scalable fonts.

Install the cm-super package using the MiKTeX package manager. Then, run initexmf --mkmaps on the command line. (Long description: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/324972/9075)

Q: I get Package csquotes Error: Unbalanced groups or invalid nesting. What can I do?

A: You have activated \MakeOuterQuote{"} and used some special babel command to allow hyphenation at other places as a dash. One example is writing application"=specific. Now, you have to decide whether you want keep using plain quotes to enquote a word or use the special hyphenation command. In other words: Do you want "quote" and app\-lication\-specific or \enquote{quote} and application"=specific?

Note that this should not happen when the template is generated as the setting tweak_outerquote ensures that these two options are mutually exclusive.

Q: I need more space. What can I do?

The most simple solution to get more space is to exchange the font.

Q: How can I reformat my .tex files?

Execute following command:

latexindent -l -s -sl -w paper.tex

Q: I want to obey the one-sentence-per-line rule. How can I do that?

Execute following command:

latexindent -m -l -s -sl -w paper.tex

Attention! This is work in progress and does not always produce best results.

Q: Is it possible to have a footer indicating that the paper is intended to be submitted/submitted/published?

Activate the llncsconf package. The possible options are listed in paper.tex.

Q: Can I also write in German?

Yes. You can regenerate the template and choose “German” as language.

Further information

• tex.stackexchange.com questions regarding LNCS: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/lncs
• Original LNCS demonstration (without the improvements): llncs-dem.pdf
• Original LNCS documentation (without the improvements): llncs-doc.pdf
• Other templates: https://latextemplates.github.io/