USENIX Example Paper
Pekka Nikander
Aalto University

Jane-Ellen Long
USENIX Association

Abstract
This is an example for a USENIX paper, in the form
of an HTML/CSS template. Being heavily self-referential, this template illustrates the features included in this template. It is expected that the
prospective authors using HTML/CSS would create
a new document based on this template, remove
the content, and start writing their paper.
Note that in this template, you may have a multi-paragraph abstract. However, that it is not necessarily a good practice. Try to keep your abstract
in one paragraph, and remember that the optimal
length for an abstract is 200-300 words.

1 Introduction
For the purposes of USENIX conference publications, the authors, not the USENIX staff, are solely
responsible for the content and formatting of their
paper. The purpose of this template is to help
those authors that want to use HTML/CSS to write
their papers. This template has been prepared by
Håkon Wium Lie, and is based on a guide to using
FrameMaker for USENIX papers, written by Pekka
Nikander with the help of Jane-Ellen Long.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows.
Section 2 gives a brief overview of related work,
such as other templates and style manuals. Section
3 discusses the details of this template, and Section 4 contains our conclusions.

2 Related Work
Preparing good-looking publications is not easy.
It requires understanding of style and typography.
The purpose of the templates provided by the
USENIX organization is to lift the burden of caring
about typography from the authors. However, the
authors still remain, and will always remain, responsible for the style.

2.1 Word and LaTeX templates
The USENIX website includes a template for Microsoft Word, as well as LaTeX templates. Many of
the settings in the CSS style sheet of this template
have been copied from the LaTeX templates.

Figure 1: This figure is showed for illustrational purposes only; floppy disks are not required to use this template.

2.2 Style manuals
Besides typography, style is the second element
of preparing easy-to-read publications. There are
tens of good style manuals available. To mention
just a couple, The Elements of Style by Strunk and
White [1] is a classic, and has remained a bestseller
since its introduction in 1930’s. From the more
contemporary ones, Writing for Computer Science
by Justin Zobel [2] seems appropriate.

3 Implementation
In this section we cover the features included in
this template. Our goal has been that the authors
do not need to make modifications to the template;
instead, they should be able to concentrate on the
content and style. With this in mind, this template
includes a number of features. On the other hand,
we have also tried to keep this document simple
and easy to maintain.
This template is written in HTML, with CSS to
provide styling, and a small JavaScript to help format references.

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Figure 2: This figure floats to the top of the page, spanning both columns.

3.1 HTML5
This template uses HTML5 elements to aid in representing the document structure. The section
element is used to split the text into sections, and
the header element holds the headlines. The
figure element is used to include figures and
their corrensponding captions live inside the figcaption element. The cite element holds all references.
A small microformat, based on a convention of
class names, is used to encode the name and affiliation of the authors.

3.2 CSS
A CSS style sheet describes how to format the
HTML document into a PDF file. CSS is a declarative language which attaches property values to
HTML elements and documents. Many aspects of
CSS is used to achieve the presentation of USENIX
papers, including:
•
•
•
•

multi-column layout
footnotes
page and column floats
multi-level counters

Some commonly used features are absent from
the above list: page numbers and running headers
should not be specifed by USENIX authors, these
are added by those who compile the Proceedings.

references to the end of the paper, leaving behind
a numeric marker.

3.4 PDF
(This section has been added by Håkon Wium Lie)
In order to convert the document to PDF, a formatter is needed. Common browsers support
HTML and CSS, but they do not support all the CSS
functionality for page-based formatting. For example, browsers do not support footnotes or page
floats. This paper has been formatted with
[a]
Prince, a purpose-built program for converting
HTML and XML documents into PDF by way of
CSS. Prince is a commercial product, but can be
downloaded and used for free for non-commercial
purposes.
In order for Prince to process the script included in this template, a command line option must
be specified:
$ prince --javascript example.html

4 Tables
The table below lists recipients of the USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award in the 1900s. Notice how
notes inside the table are moved to the end of the
table.
Year

Recipient

1999

X Window System*

3.3 JavaScript

1998

Tim Berners-Lee

This template uses JavaScript to process references. References are added at the point where
they appear, and a script is later used to move the

1997

Brian W. Kernighan

[a] www.princexml.com

1996

The Software Tools Project

work.

1995

The Creation of USENET **

1994

Networking Technologies

Availability

1993

Berkeley UNIX

* Given to the Community at Large
** Given to Jim Ellis and Tom Truscott

5 Conclusions
Each good paper concludes the most significant
findings in the end.

Acknowledgments
A polite author always includes acknowledgments.
Thank everyone, especially those who funded the

Please include a section at the end of your paper
providing availability information. If the system
you describe is available to others, and if more information (reports, etc.) may be obtained, indicate
terms and contact information.

References
[1] STRUNK, W. JR., AND WHITE, E.B. The Elements
of Style, 4th Ed, Allyn and Bacon, August, 1999,
ISBN 020530902X
[2] ZOBEL, J. Writing for Computer Science,
Springer-Verlag,
December
1997,
ISBN
9813083220