We’ve all been there. Our paper draft is 13 pages long, yet the submission format limits us to 9 pages of main content. The reviewers always expect a lot of information, yet there seems to be no way to fit all of this detail into the 9 pages. So what should you do?
First, the usual advice applies. Check your writing for repetitiveness and see if you can explain your contributions more concisely. Getting colleagues to read your draft and give comments usually helps you to identify parts that are too verbose (or not clear enough). So maybe with an editing pass or two you now can reduce your paper draft to 12 pages. Still way too long.
Next, we encourage you to reflect about which parts of your paper draft really are essential to tell your main story. Is all detail really needed to convey the main message? Maybe some aspects could be summarized in the main paper, and the detail could then be conveyed in an appendix for those readers who wish to re-implement the approach or wish to dive deeper into the topic. Or fewer example images are sufficient, and a further selection of examples could be presented in a separate appendix. With the changes we introduced this year we make this form of content presentation easy for you: you can have appendices to which you refer (with hyperlinked references) from the main paper. And you can then submit (for the reviewing cycles) the whole document as one PDF, without having to split it into a main paper part and an appendix part (this split will only be needed for the final camera-ready version, unless you want to pay the IEEE for the extra pages). However, please note that the main paper still has to stand on its own: the reviewers have to be able to understand and evaluate your approach even without appendices, they are not required to review these.
Great, you now take advantage of the appendices and your main paper is now 10 pages long. You still need to cut a whole page! No, usually you don’t. Let’s look at some rather low-level aspects of your paper. Specifically, the last line of each paragraph. Often there is a single word (or maybe two or three short ones) on that last line, yet most of the line is empty. Those words are called orphans, and they each lose you a whole line of space. Let’s get rid of them! It is nearly always possible to reword the paragraph such that that line disappears and you save the line—without really having to cut any paper content. In addition, it is nearly always possible to cut a line (or more) from any paragraph that is more than 15 lines long, using the same wordsmithing strategy. Sometimes this saving does not immediately propagate to the rest of the paper due to the way paragraphs and sections break across pages. But if you go through all orphans in our draft you will see the space savings propagate to the end. Sometimes it also helps to place figures on a different column or on a neighboring page for the space savings to propagate better. Overall, you can often optimize your paper significantly, space savings of half a page are absolutely possible.
Now you can look at the figures you use in the paper. Do they use space efficiently? A first rule is that there should not be any white space at the edge of a figure—(LaTeX) typesetting takes care of the needed white space around figures. Also you should see if the figures can be organized better such that they use less vertical space, because vertical space is what we are trying to save. Maybe a figure also does not need to spread across two columns but can be a slightly smaller, single-column figure with some re-arrangement?
Overall, by following this process we have outlined you should be able to reduce the paper to the 9 pages of text that IEEE VIS allows for submissions, usually without losing any significant content. And with this optimization you also make the job of the reviewers easier: they get a well-polished and concise manuscript to review.