Camera Ready

camera-ready: Accepted Paper → Camera-Ready + Review Implementation

For a paper that has been accepted (no rebuttal stage): produce the camera-ready version and implement the reviewers' (typically minor) revisions. Distinct from strategic-revision --external, which handles R&R (rebuttal, DAG, resubmission strategy).

When to Use

• Acceptance notification arrived; reviews are final; you implement rather than argue.
• Triggers: "prepare the camera-ready", "implement the reviews for the accepted paper", "de-anonymize and finalize".

Operating Rules (read first)

• Overleaf-canonical: edit the Overleaf/paper/ symlink target, not any git mirror (overleaf-canonical-source.md). The .tex is a live edit surface — obey reconcile-before-rewriting.md (fresh-read, narrow edits, no replace_all/full-Write, mtime check).
• Phased-work: stop after each phase, summarize, await continue (phased-work.md) unless --autonomous.
• mark-unverified: never assert a reviewer-suggested citation/venue fact you haven't verified.
• Status logging: acceptance means the vault/atlas status should move to Accepted/camera-ready per multi-system-completeness.md — but if the formal decision letter hasn't landed yet (early prep), hold status changes until the user confirms.

Phase 0 — Setup & verify

1. Save the reviews to paper-{venue}/correspondence/referee-reviews/<YYYY-MM-DD>-<venue>-reviews.md (score table + verbatim text).
2. Back up the submitted main.tex/.bib/.pdf → paper-{venue}/backup/submitted-<YYYY-MM-DD>/.
3. Verify reviewer-suggested citations before adding any (DOI/title via scholarly/paperpile); reviewers often mis-spell/mis-date (e.g. "Edelmann 1996" → Suchman & Edelman 1996). Stash verified new entries.
4. Build a reviewer-point → action table so nothing is dropped; confirm scope with the user.
5. Confirm the page-limit rule (see Phase 3) — [UNVERIFIED] until checked against the CfP/acceptance email.

Phase 1 — Camera-ready mechanics (low-risk)

• De-anonymize: replace \author{Anonymous Submission} with the real author/affiliation block.
• Copyright: AAAI auto-renders the slug from the style; set \copyrightyear{<proceedings year>}. ACM: set \setcopyright/\acmConference/DOI per the rights email. Never use \nocopyright for AAAI.
• Section numbering: AAAI submissions ship with \setcounter{secnumdepth}{0} → set to 2. This also fixes blank Section~\ref{} references (a common reviewer complaint).
• Compile; confirm 0 undefined refs and the copyright slug renders on p1.

Phase 2 — Bibliography

• If adopting canonical (e.g. Paperpile) keys, invoke bib-rekey (DOI-safe remap + diff-verified \cite rewrite).
• Add the verified reviewer-suggested citations and any self-citations (camera-ready is de-anonymized, so self-cites are normal — use the published entry, not the arXiv preprint, when one exists).
• Compile; 0 undefined citations.

Phase 3 — Structure (appendix offload) — GATED on the page rule

• First verify whether the venue's page limit excludes the technical appendix (AAAI/AIES typically count body + figures; references and a post-references appendix are often exempt — confirm). This determines how aggressively to offload.
• If excluded: move full proofs / long derivations / worked-example arithmetic to \appendix after references; leave each result's statement + a 3–5 sentence proof sketch + appendix pointer in the body.
• Equation-label coupling: if a proof you are moving defines equations the body references, lift those equations into the body first (else body text points at appendix equation numbers). Verify 0 undefined after.

Phase 4 — Reviewer revisions + intuition aids

• Implement each row of the Phase-0 action table.
• Common high-value additions for broad-audience venues: a plain-language mechanics paragraph, a notation table, a results-at-a-glance table, one-line Reading glosses, and a mechanism figure/boxed causal chain (covers "more visualization" and "more plain-language" asks at once).
• Apply any consistency fixes surfaced in Phase 0 (e.g. clamped first-best, index-vs-probability clarifications) — flag any that touch a theorem's math for author sign-off before editing.

Phase 5 — QA

• latexmk clean (exit 0); 0 undefined refs/citations; no large overfull boxes; no placeholders/TODOs.
• Page-budget check: locate where references/appendix begin (pdftotext + form-feed page count, or per-label pages from .aux); confirm body ≤ limit (appendix/refs exempt per Phase 3).
• Visual render key pages (pdftoppm) — de-anon header + copyright slug, new tables/figures, appendix.
• Run proofread scoped to the new prose only.
• Token conservation vs the submitted version — uv run python .scripts/check_token_conservation.py --source backup/<submitted>.tex --revision <current>.tex per edited file: every advisory row (changed number, dropped/added citation) must map to a Phase-0 action-table row or a Phase-3 appendix move. Spot-check reworded claims against the claim-strength ladder (docs/reference/claim-strength-ladder.md) — no silent strength moves between the reviewed version and camera-ready.
• Arithmetic forensics (empirical papers) — uv run python .scripts/check_stat_forensics.py <main>.tex: recomputed p-values, df-vs-N, t-vs-descriptives, GRIM. Any HARD finding gets resolved or explained before upload — reviewers approved the numbers as submitted; the camera-ready must not introduce (or ship) an arithmetic impossibility.

Phase 6 — Author-side handoff

Report what remains for the human: acknowledgments (now un-anonymized — offer a funding stub), signed copyright/rights form, reproducibility checklist, and the vault/atlas status update to Accepted (per the Operating Rules caveat).

When the user confirms the camera-ready was uploaded: append the history: rows to the vault submission entry (event: decision, outcome: accept if not already recorded, then event: camera-ready with the archive files: pointer) and archive the as-submitted files per rules/submission-file-archive.md (human-supplied only).

Anti-Patterns

• Don't move proofs to an appendix before confirming the appendix is page-exempt. If it counts, you've just relocated, not saved, space.
• Don't replace_all or full-Write the live .tex. Narrow edits; for bulk citekey work defer to bib-rekey's diff-verified flow.
• Don't add a reviewer-suggested citation from memory. Verify it — reviewers mis-cite.
• Don't chain all phases in one response. Checkpoint per phased-work.md.
• Don't log acceptance to vault/atlas if the formal decision letter hasn't arrived — confirm with the user.

Verification

• All reviewer points map to a concrete edit (action table fully checked off).
• Build clean, 0 undefined, body within page limit, copyright slug present, author block de-anonymized.
• Submitted version preserved in backup/.

Cross-References