The style file here was adapted from kourgeorge/arxiv-style, with mostly aesthetic edits, as well as how to handle the title, authors, and their institutions.

Description:

The project hosts an aesthetic and simple LaTeX style suitable for "preprint" publications such as arXiv and biorXiv, etc. It is based on the nips_2018.sty style.

This styling maintains the aesthetic of NeurIPS but adding and changing features to make it (IMO) even better and more suitable for preprints.

Why NeurIPS?

Because the NeurIPS styling is a comfortable single column format that is very aesthetic and convenient for reading. The result looks fairly different from NeurIPS style so that readers won't get confused to think that the preprint was published in NeurIPS.

Usage:

1. Use Document class article.
2. Copy xiv.sty to the folder containing your tex file.
3. add \usepackage{xiv} after \documentclass{article}.
4. The only packages used in the style file are geometry and fancyheader. Do not reimport them.

See template.tex

Project files:

1. xiv.sty - the style file.
2. main.tex - a sample template that uses the xiv style.
3. references.bib - the bibliography source file for template.tex.
4. main.pdf - a sample output of the template file that demonstrated the design provided by the xiv style.

Handling References when submitting to arXiv.org

The most convenient way to manage references is using an external BibTeX file and pointing to it from the main file. However, this requires running the bibtex tool to "compile" the .bib file and create .bbl file containing "bibitems" that can be directly inserted in the main tex file. However, unfortunately the arXiv Tex environment (Tex Live) do not do that. So easiest way when submitting to arXiv is to create a single self-contained .tex file that contains the references. This can be done by running the BibTeX command on your machine and insert the content of the generated .bbl file into the .tex file and commenting out the \bibliography{references} that point to the external references file.

Below are the commands that should be run in the project folder: 1. Run $ latex template 2. Run $ bibtex template 3. A template.bbl file will be generated (make sure it is there) 4. Copy the template.bbl file content to template.tex into the \begin{thebibliography} command. 5. Comment out the \bibliography{references} command in template.tex. 6. You ready to submit to arXiv.org.

General Notes:

1. For help, comments, praises, bug reporting or change requests, you can contact the author at: kourgeorge/at/gmail.com.
2. You can use, redistribute and do whatever with this project, however, the author takes no responsibility on whatever usage of this project.
3. If you start another project based on this project, it would be nice to mention/link to this project.
4. You are very welcome to contribute to this project.
5. A good looking 2 column template can be found in https://github.com/brenhinkeller/preprint-template.tex.