How to check PDF compliance
for camera-ready papers

Why these four checks

A proceedings volume is one print job. The printer imposes one page size, one trim, one set of embedded fonts. A single deviating paper can make the printer reject the whole file, usually days before the conference: an A4 page in a Letter volume, or a font that lives only on the author's laptop. IEEE solves this by forcing every paper through PDF eXpress. Independent conferences can run the same checks themselves.

1. Page size

pdfinfo (part of Poppler) prints the media box of the first page:

$ pdfinfo paper.pdf | grep "Page size"
Page size:      595.276 x 841.89 pts (A4)

A4 is 595.28 × 841.89 pt; US Letter is 612 × 792 pt. Allow a tolerance of about 1 pt, since Word exports are often off by a fraction. Check every page, not just the first: a paper scanned from mixed sources can have one rogue page. pdfinfo -f 1 -l 999 paper.pdf lists all pages.

The subtle failure is a paper that looks A4 but was exported at Letter and scaled: the page size is right, yet the margins are wrong because the content shrank. Page size alone misses that, so margins need their own check:

2. Margins (text-block position)

No standard tool prints "the margins" directly, because a PDF has no margin concept, only ink on a page. What you can measure is the bounding box of the rendered content and compare it against the template's expected text block. mutool (from MuPDF) extracts per-page text with coordinates:

$ mutool draw -F stext -o page1.xml paper.pdf 1

From the stext XML, take the minimum and maximum x/y of all text lines and compare with your template's text block. A tolerance of 5–10 pt absorbs Word's export jitter; deviations beyond that usually mean the author edited the template's page setup or their export scaled the page.

If scripting this is more than you want to take on, this is the check where a tool pays for itself: it is tedious to eyeball and the errors are invisible until pages sit next to each other in the bound volume.

3. Font embedding

pdffonts (Poppler again) is the one-second check:

$ pdffonts paper.pdf
name                    type         emb sub uni
TimesNewRomanPSMT       TrueType     yes yes yes
CambriaMath             TrueType     yes yes yes

Every row must say yes in the emb column. A no means the PDF references a font by name and assumes the viewing machine has it. Your screen shows the paper correctly because the font is installed there; the printer's RIP substitutes something else. This is the classic "it looked fine on my machine" print failure.

4. Page count

pdfinfo paper.pdf | grep Pages. Trivial to check, awkward to enforce late: an over-length paper discovered during assembly needs an author revision, and by then the author believes they are done. Check at submission and bounce it back immediately.

Run the checks at upload, not at assembly

All four checks are mechanical, which means they can run the moment an author uploads, and the author can fix problems while the paper is still fresh in their mind. The alternative is the traditional one: the volume editor discovers 30 non-compliant papers three weeks later and starts an email campaign.

In Ready.Pub, these checks run automatically on upload: contributors see pass/fail per check with the measured values, and the editor sees a compliance column across all papers on the proceedings dashboard. The assembly guide covers the full process from collected PDFs to a stamped, indexed volume.