venue-fork

Venue Fork: Second-Venue Submission Variant

Fork a paper for a second venue while the original submission keeps living. A fork is a copy (both venues track independently), unlike retarget-journal (a move) and preprint (a non-archival variant that must NOT get a vault submission entry).

When to Use

• A venue window explicitly permits concurrent submission (e.g. WINE 2026 ⟷ FOCS/SAGT/AFT 2026)
• A rejected paper needs a reformatted version for a differently-formatted venue
• the user says "submit this also to X", "concurrent submission to X", "make the X version"

Phase 0 — CFP compliance sheet (blocks everything)

Fetch the official CFP (never WikiCFP alone; mark-unverified applies) and record:

Timing analysis (report to the user): if the source venue notifies before the target's rebuttal/notification, acceptance there forces withdrawal from the target before any reviews arrive — the fork is then insurance + comments-on-rejection, not guaranteed feedback. Say so explicitly before doing the work.

Phase 1 — Create the fork

1. New Overleaf project via Dropbox (the active client may create these — folder + main.tex = project): Apps/Overleaf/Paper {Theme} {Short Name} ({VENUE} {YY})/ — Title Case, venue suffix, per the existing naming convention. Resolve the Dropbox root per multi-machine.md.
2. Copy from the source project: main.tex, the bib, figure dirs, any .bst the target format needs. Never edit the source project's files — it is a live submission surface.
3. Project dir: mkdir <project>/paper-{venue}/ + relative symlink paper-{venue}/paper → ../../../../../Apps/Overleaf/<name> (absolute symlinks break cross-machine).

Phase 2 — Document-class conversion

Target submission formats like WINE's are satisfied by plain \documentclass[11pt,a4paper]{article}

• \usepackage[margin=1in]{geometry}. Conversion map:

• Grep the body first: grep -o '\\begin{[a-z]*}' main.tex | sort | uniq -c tells you exactly which theorem environments to define — the AFT paper needed none, the SAGT paper needed nine.
• cleveref: load hyperref then \usepackage[capitalise,noabbrev]{cleveref} when the body uses \cref/\Cref (LIPIcs loads it via class option).
• .bst files: plainurl.bst ships with TeX Live (urlbst); splncs04.bst must be copied into the fork. Check with kpsewhich <name>.bst before assuming.

Phase 3 — Page-budget refit (relocate, never cut)

1. Compile; find where the body ends: pdftotext -f N -l N main.pdf - per page around the expected boundary — locate the References header page.
2. Compute overrun against the CFP budget (mind what's excluded: title page/references usually don't count; an 18pp LNCS body ≈ 12–13pp at 11pt/1in — LNCS text block is ~40% smaller).
3. Relocate in this order until the body fits, adding \appendix sections with pointer lines (\noindent\emph{The proof appears in Appendix~\ref{...}.}):
   1. Detail subsections readers can defer (experimental-design grids, implementation details)
   2. Large floats (tables/figures) — \cref keeps resolving when labels move with the float
   3. Longest proofs → "Omitted Proofs" appendix, re-titled \begin{proof}[Proof of Theorem~\ref{...}]
   4. Whole peripheral sections (motivating applications, extended demarcation)
4. Never cut prose to fit — relocation only (manuscript-edit-budget rule). Update any in-text Section~\ref pointing at moved content to Appendix~\ref.

Phase 4 — QA gates (all must pass)

• latexmk -pdf exit 0; grep -c 'LaTeX Warning: Reference\|Warning: Citation' main.log → 0.
• Body-end page ≤ budget (re-run the Phase 3 boundary check — floats move on recompile).
• Anonymity grep on the tex: author surname, first name, all affiliated institutions, acknowledg, our prior, we showed, in earlier work. Then eyeball p1 of the PDF.
• Render-level check (compile logs cannot catch wrong-symbol output): pdftotext the PDF and grep for symbols that should/shouldn't appear — especially after any macro rename (see Gotchas).

Phase 5 — Submission + writeback (after the user submits)

Multi-system completeness — all of these, then verify:

1. Vault submission file submissions/<topic>-<venue>-<year>.md: status: Submitted, submitted_date, and exactly one attention date: notification_date for a real CFP decision date or follow_up_date for an operational journal check-in. Set conference dates, double_blind, paper_id, and a body concurrency clause: which venue notifies first and the withdrawal obligation. Link the primary submission entry.
2. Atlas topic outputs[]: new venue entry, status: Submitted (output-ladder canon only), same dates, notes carrying the concurrency clause, and the full submission-join set per rules/atlas-status-vocabulary.md § submission-join completeness: paper_id (same as the vault entry), paper_title (must equal the registry canonical_title), and — if the venue is a Conference/Workshop — cycle: <Venue> <edition-year> (journals exempt). (Do NOT bump last_reviewed — a venue swap is not topic-file curation; only update-topic-file writes that field.) Validate with atlas-vault/schema.py; validate-portfolio-registry.py catches any missed join as cycle-gap/title-gap at the next session-close. If the fork target has no venue file yet, create ~/vault/venues/<slug>.md with canon-only ranking fields (cabs/core/scimago/venue_type from the fixed sets — lookup caveats go in # comments after a canon value, never in the value).
3. Submitted-PDF archive: verify the HotCRP/CMT-downloaded PDF page-matches the local build, file at <project>/paper-{venue}/submitted-YYYY-MM-DD.pdf (outside the Overleaf symlink), add a pointer line in the vault entry.
4. Inbox: curl -X POST localhost:8765/api/sync (Mac Mini) and confirm the notification item appears; mark the met submission-deadline item done.

Gotchas (each cost real time on 2026-07-02)

• Macro renames: \b does not fire before _. re.sub(r'\\cap\b', ...) misses \cap_j (underscore is a word char) — and the un-renamed token still compiles, rendering the WRONG symbol silently. Use (?![a-zA-Z]) as the boundary and pdftotext-verify the output.
• Macro names: \newcommand{\cap_} is invalid (redefines \cap); never end a macro name with _; check clashes with amssymb (\Cap) before choosing.
• Missing bib looks fine in Overleaf because a copied .bbl renders references anyway — check the file list, not the PDF, when confirming the fork is complete.
• Paperpile CLI snapshot lag: freshly imported refs miss in get-item/lookup-by-doi for a while; the app-side BibTeX export is the authoritative canonical-key source meanwhile.
• Merge adjacent \cite{a}\cite{b} → \cite{a,b} after batch key swaps.

Anti-Patterns

• Don't edit or compile inside the source venue's Overleaf project — fork first, then touch.
• Don't cut prose to make the page budget — relocate to appendices.
• Don't create the vault submission entry for a preprint-server post — that's preprint's domain and the preprint-vs-submission rule forbids it.
• Don't skip verifying the concurrent policy on the SOURCE venue's side.
• Don't report "ready" from compile success alone — run the render-level check.
• Don't hand-author bib entries — Paperpile-canonical keys only (paperpile-citations rule).

Verification

The fork is done when: fork compiles clean at/under budget with 0 warnings; anonymity + render checks pass; source project untouched (ls -lt mtimes); after submission, vault + atlas agree (Submitted, same dates), schema validates, the inbox shows the notification or follow-up item, and the submitted-PDF archive is filed with a pointer.