Quarto Usenix (Journal) Style

This is a journal format for Quarto that aims to match the USENIX template for conferences such as USENIX Security, NSDI, OSDI, SOUPS, and others.

WARNING: read before you use this template

Known differences from template

Please be aware that, if you compare the output of this template with the USENIX sample PDF file, you'll find that there are subtle differences. (Pull requests with fixes are welcome!)

• Less spacing around figure captions
• Less spacing around verbatim environment
• Internal links (citations, sections/figures) are blue instead of red and green, respectively
  • This doesn't seem to be actually defined in the template, however.
• URLs are colored a slightly different shade of blue.
• URLs use a different (non-monospaced) font

Additionally:

Tables are a Problem

Under the hood, Quarto uses pandoc for all document conversions, and pandoc generates tables using longtable, which doesn't work in two-column layouts. This is a known and long-standing issue for pandoc and Quarto itself. (Other templates also face this problem.)

I've implemented the most commonly recommended workaround, which is what the official Quarto templates also use. (See that file for more documentation and context.) However:

• This only works for regular tables (\begin{table}). Full-width tables (\begin{table*}) are still broken. (As documented in the file, you can switch between the two types, but having both is difficult.)

• I also encountered an odd bug with longtable where entire pages would be omitted from the PDF. I really suspect this is a problem with longtable (not this template, the workaround, Quarto, or pandoc), but I didn't track it down or confirm it with others. However, my only solution was to update the LaTeX that was output by Quarto, replacing longtables with regular tables.

Therefore, if you plan to have tables in your paper, think twice before using this template (or any Pandoc-based workflow, assuming you're dealing with two-column articles.)

Creating a new article

To create a new article using this format:

quarto use template nmalkin/quarto-usenix

This will create a new directory with an example document that uses this format.

Using with an existing document

To add this format to an existing document:

quarto add nmalkin/quarto-usenix

Then, add the format to your document options:

format:
  usenix-pdf: default

Example

Here is the source code for a minimal sample document: template.qmd. It is meant to generate output that matches that of the USENIX LaTeX template.