page-adjustment

name	page-adjustment
description	Strategies for fitting a paper to a venue's page limit without destroying content quality. Applies to any phase that modifies paper content.
tags	["writing","latex","page-limit","appendix","compression"]

Page Adjustment

Guiding Principle

Page adjustment is surgery, not demolition. Every change must preserve the paper's technical accuracy, figure correctness, and citation integrity. The approach should be proportional to the gap — small gaps need small edits, large gaps may require structural changes.

Assess the Gap First

Before making any change, compile and measure:

• How many pages over/under? This determines the scale of intervention.
• Small gap (< 0.3 pages): Tighten or loosen prose — a sentence here, a paragraph there. No structural changes needed.
• Medium gap (0.3–1.0 pages): May need to add/remove a paragraph, resize a figure, or move a TEXT subsection to appendix (keep figures in the body).
• Large gap (> 1.0 pages): Structural changes — move entire subsections to/from appendix, add/remove a discussion section, consolidate related work.

Match the intervention to the gap. Do not restructure the paper to fix a 0.2-page overshoot.

When Adding New Content

When new experiment results or analyses need to be added (review phase, dev phase, any iteration):

1. Consider appendix for details. Full experiment methodology, detailed tables, and per-category breakdowns often fit better in \appendix, with a brief summary (1-3 sentences) and forward reference in the main body.
2. Budget before writing. Estimate how much space the new content needs. If the main body is already at or near the limit, the appendix is the natural home for details.
3. Balance additions with removals. If you add a paragraph, look for an equal-length passage that can be condensed or moved to appendix. Do this in the same edit — do not defer to a later compression pass.

Compression Strategy (over limit) — use in priority order

Strategies are ranked by information loss, not by effort. Exhaust every option in a higher priority before touching the next priority. "Venue-limit at any cost" is not a valid excuse for jumping ahead; the compression mechanism will keep looping until the body fits, so burning a loop on a lossless strategy is always preferable to a lossy one.

Priority 1 — LOSSLESS (same content, reshaped)

These move or compact content without deleting anything substantive. Try all of these before Priority 2.

• Move TEXT/tables to \appendix — NOT figures. Detailed per-category breakdowns, extended ablation tables, full proofs/derivations, hyperparameter sweeps, prompt templates, implementation minutiae, dataset statistics beyond a summary — these belong in appendix. Keep a 1–3 sentence body summary with a forward reference. Figures stay in the body: never relocate a method/result/concept figure to the appendix just to fit the page limit (condense prose instead, or — under relaxed page-fitting — accept a slightly over/short last page). A figure pushed to the appendix to save space usually should not have been generated at all.
• Merge short related subsections. Two adjacent subsections that each have fewer than three sentences or that discuss the same concept can become one subsection with a single heading.
• Tighten prose. Remove hedging ("it is worth noting that…", "we note that…", "as a point of interest"), collapse two-item lists into inline text ("(i) A and (ii) B" → "A and B"), delete redundant restatements of a result already given elsewhere.

Priority 2 — MINIMALLY LOSSY (small reformatting cost)

Only touch these after Priority 1 is exhausted.

• Table font compression. Use \footnotesize (or \scriptsize for wide tables with only numbers), remove redundant header rows. Do NOT remove data columns or rows.
• Caption shortening. Reduce captions to 1–2 sentences. Move the mechanistic explanation into the paragraph that first references the figure.

Priority 3 — LOSSY, MANIFEST-GATED (last resort)

These change what the reader actually sees. Consult figures/figure_manifest.json's scalable field before acting on any figure — the field exists precisely so you don't have to guess whether shrinking is safe.

• Shrink bitmap figures via \includegraphics[width=…]. Only allowed when the manifest entry says "scalable": true. These are typically PaperBanana/Nano-Banana rendered concept figures; their labels are rasterized so a 10–20% reduction is fine.
• Regenerate matplotlib figures with smaller figsize. When a matplotlib figure is too wide/tall, open its plotting function in scripts/create_paper_figures.py and reduce figsize there, then re-run the script. Do NOT resize via \includegraphics (scalable: false in the manifest forbids this) — matplotlib bakes text into the PDF at authoring time, so shrinking via LaTeX makes labels unreadable at 48% scale.
• Switch figure* ↔ figure. A figure originally placed as figure* + \textwidth can be moved into a column if its aspect ratio and label density allow it after regeneration. Update the manifest's placement field to match.

Never (regardless of priority)

• Delete figures, data rows, bars, subplots, or table entries — see figure-integrity skill.
• Delete \cite{} commands or modify references.bib.
• Exceed the venue page limit to preserve content. Desk rejection is worse than a sparse body; the hard ceiling is inviolable.

Widow / Orphan check (always, after any compression pass)

If after compression the body ends by spilling a single orphan line (a widow) onto the page beyond the limit — for example body occupies pages 1 through N+1 where page N+1 has ≤3 lines of content — do NOT respond by moving more content to appendix. Moving a paragraph removes much more than the offending 1–3 lines and produces an under-filled page N. Instead:

• Identify the paragraph whose tail landed on the overflow page (it is almost always the last body paragraph before references).
• Tighten that paragraph by 5–15 words: merge two short clauses, drop adverbial hedging, replace multi-word phrases ("on a held-out validation split" → "on held-out"), or collapse a trailing example list.
• Recompile; the orphan line should reflow into page N's last column.

A widow is a compile-level layout artefact, not a content problem. Structural changes (move to appendix) are the wrong tool.

Expansion Strategy (under limit)

• Deepen analysis: explain why results look the way they do, not just what
• Add related work: compare with 2–3 more relevant papers, specific technical differences
• Expand methodology: hyperparameters, hardware specs, dataset details that aid reproducibility
• Bring appendix content back: if content was moved to appendix during prior compression, selectively restore the most important parts
• Add a Limitations paragraph if one doesn't exist

What to Avoid

• Avoid changing numbers in figures, tables, or quantitative claims — these come from result files
• Avoid removing figures or tables entirely when they can be moved to appendix instead
• Avoid deleting \cite{} commands or modifying references.bib
• Avoid adding filler text or restating what was already said
• Avoid fabricating new experimental results to fill space

Sensitive Areas

These elements require extra care during page adjustment:

• Figure data and labels — sourced from results/ files. If you must modify a figure, re-read the source data. Do not change values from memory.
• Table values — same principle. Move or resize the table, but be careful with its contents.
• references.bib — managed by the citation system. Prefer not to touch it.
• Venue template — \documentclass, \usepackage, .sty, .bst are off-limits.

Document Structure

The correct ordering of sections at the end of the paper is:

1. Body text (up to page limit)
2. \clearpage + \bibliography{references} — references start on a new page
3. \clearpage + \appendix — appendix starts on a new page after references

Never place \appendix before \bibliography. When adding appendix content, verify this ordering is maintained.

Stray \clearpage/\newpage between body sections is a top cause of a large blank gap at the bottom of a page. The only page breaks in the body are the two above (before \bibliography, before \appendix). If you see a big vertical blank — especially mid-paper before a \section{...} — search for a \clearpage or \newpage between body sections and delete it; let the text flow continuously. Do NOT try to fill the gap with \vspace or padding.

Verification After Adjustment

After every page adjustment pass:

1. Compile and check page count
2. Spot-check 2-3 quantitative values against results/ files — especially any figure or table you touched
3. Check for LaTeX warnings on unresolved \ref{} or \cite{}
4. Read through any section you modified — no dangling references to moved content
5. Verify document structure: body → references → appendix (in that order)