I think the two-column SIGGRAPH format is a poor fit for modern (i.e., electronic, which all proceedings now are) papers.

I believe that the two-column format was designed to minimize the printing cost of the SIGGRAPH proceedings. For the reader (and reviewers!), it makes it hard to copy sections of text, and hard to read on a mobile device or web browser because one has to scroll in two dimensions.

For the author, two columns it means taking equations, figures, and code that might naturally have a fairly wide layout and breaking them across lines to try and shoehorn into 3 inches.

The JCGT template uses the same fonts and macros as the SIGGRAPH template and has strictly wider text width, which makes it easy to port papers originally formatted using the SIGGRAPH template. We kept fairly narrow text width to improve readability, and will probably continue to tweak line spacing and text width. Equations, figures, and code can span as much of the page (even into the margins) as they need.

It is nice to get as much as possible on one page, and the current JCGT template does not excel in that area. Viewing as a continuous PDF on a tablet is one solution today. In the future, I’d like to see a format with layout as precise as PDF enable reflow, which would allow papers to adapt to the reading habits and devices of the readers. HTML 5 still provides insufficient kerning and equation formatting for a mathematically-dense technical publication (although it is getting much better), but perhaps in a few years we will see a better standard. There have been some great graphics papers on dynamic text layout and general document resizing–perhaps a future JCGT paper will pave the way for better formatted papers everywhere. But, this is very much in the future right now. Choosing a widely-accepted document format (PDF) and tailoring the template to the needs of the equations and code that are the heart of a JCGT paper remains our best solution.

For readers who prefer to see two columns, the solution is simple: from your PDF viewer, print the paper with two or four pages side-by-side. You can print to PDF to continue reading electronically or print onto paper and read that way.

I promise to continue revisiting this issue and adjusting the template to maximize readability as we gain more experience typesetting papers for electronic-only publishing. The first version of our template already includes bookmarks and hyperlinks within the document and to external resources, which is an important step towards leveraging the advantages of the medium.

Morgan
JCGT Editor-in-Chief

I remember seeing him a few times either last summer or summer of 2010 at WDAS, and always regretted never introducing myself, now even more-so.