How to use the Springer LNCS LaTeX template

Here’s how to use the \( \LaTeX \) template from Springer for a Computer Science conference publication. The template and relevant files are found at this page: Information for Authors of Computer Science Publications

I remember this being pretty confusing the first time I looked at how to do this. The necessary files are in different zip packages and there’s no minimally working example. So here’s a simple example on how to compile your first \( \LaTeX \) document for Springer’s LNCS publications.

These steps/hints should help:

llncs2e.zip contains the files that are used to “style” your \( \LaTeX \) document
typeinst.zip contains an example .tex file (which you can replace with your actual content)

What you want to do is copy the relevant style files from llncs2e.zip to the files from typeinst.zip.

1) Download and extract llncs2e.zip into a folder, call the folder llncs
2) Download and extract typeinst.zip into a separate folder, call the folder typeinst
3) Copy llncs.cls from folder llncs into the typeinst folder
4) Open typeinst.tex and try to compile

It most likely will give you this error:

Error line 248
! LaTeX Error: File `eijkel2′ not found.See the LaTeX manual or LaTeX Companion for explanation.Type H for immediate help…. \includegraphics[height=6.2cm]{eijkel2}

This is because \( \LaTeX \) does not read/convert .eps files by default. So you can either a) convert .eps to .pdf by adding \usepackage{epstopdf}, or b) comment out the line that uses the .eps and use a different image type for your project.

a) To convert .eps to a .pdf, add the epstopdf package after the graphicx package….
i.e. near the top of typeinst.tex add \usepackage{epstopdf} so it looks like the below…

\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{epstopdf}

b) To comment out the line, just add the “%” symbol before the relevant line like this:

%\includegraphics[height=6.2cm]{eijkel2}

You should now be able to compile the .tex into the PDF.

\( \LaTeX \) has a bit of a learning curve at first but once you get the hang of things, \( \LaTeX \) is really nice to work with and can save you a lot of time 🙂