Using the IEEEtran class for Robotics conferences

IEEE-RAS provides some LaTeX template files for conferences but:

• The IEEEtran.cls file has somehow been renamed ieeeconf.cls, which clashes with another package actually named IEEEconf and is confusing (IEEEconf is a separate class used for IEEE Computer Society manuscripts).
• The version provided is 1.6b, instead of 1.7
• The sample document uses deprecated commands (\overrideIEEEmargins)

This post is about getting your document to work with the current release of IEEEtran.

Disclaimer: These instructions are primarily for personal reference, so that I can safely forget about this until the next time I need them.

These worked for me, they are a solution but probably not the best/optimal one. If you’ve got a better way, I’d love to hear it to update this guide.

Add these to your preamble:

\newcommand{\CLASSINPUTtoptextmargin}{19mm}
\newcommand{\CLASSINPUTbottomtextmargin}{18mm}
\newcommand{\CLASSINPUTinnersidemargin}{19mm}
\newcommand{\CLASSINPUToutersidemargin}{19mm}

These commands should be before your \documentclass command. They set the margins manually to those specified by RAS: http://ras.papercept.net/conferences/support/page.php

Note the top text margin is the one for all but the first page. The first page top margin will be set later.

Then, specify the document class:

\documentclass[letterpaper, conference]{IEEEtran}

The document class should be IEEEtran, which provides support for conferences, journals, and tech reports. IEEEconf is actually only used for IEEE Computer Society manuscripts.

\title{\vspace{6mm}Paper Title}

Because the title page wants an extra 6mm, we must manually introduce a vertical offset in the title.

You should run your paper through the PDF test to check your paper for compliance: https://ras.papercept.net/conferences/scripts/pdftest.pl. The full test will check margins.