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Comment by antegamisou | Hacker News Reader

Since it's highly likely someone is going to ask, here's some information on how Keenan creates the beautiful illustrations in papers:

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kmcrane/Projects/Other/IllustratingG...

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Does anyone know how he writes his papers? His illustrations will forever be beyond my skills, but I’d like to up my paper mojo. Since his references are in bibtex, I assume he’s using some flavor of TeX, but this looks more sophisticated than LaTeX. In particular, he has small sub-illustrations next to his section headings that are really hard to get right using LaTeX. Is he using ConTeXt? Which fonts does he use? The ligatures are really nice, also hard to do using standard LaTeX available fonts.

Probably uses the ACM SIGGRAPH TeX template files.

For example, a recent paper of his team "Repulsive Surfaces" is on arXiv, where the source files of the preprint PDF are available for download

https://arxiv.org/format/2107.01664

Wow, you're correct, he uses ACM TOG for the paper. As a scientist, I mostly just use the REVTeX packages or tufts-latex. Evidently there's a brave new world of other templates out there that I need to learn about. Thanks.

The paper is in LaTeX and uses the required ACMTOG template (also used for SIGGRAPH papers); you can get it at https://www.siggraph.org/preparing-your-content/author-instr...

The inset figures are probably placed using the “wrapfigure” LaTeX package. It’s janky and frustrating to use, but I agree the results look great!

EDIT: Incidentally the template changed recently and people within the graphics community complained about some aspects of it, e.g. the equation typesetting and how subsections and lists are formatted. It's good to hear that people outside the community like it.

You may want to look at Lyx, a WYSIWYG Tex editor

https://www.lyx.org/

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