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Book of Abstract and Daily Session Plan generator for the GAMM annual meeting from ConfTool

Directory structure

  • CSV folder hosting the CSV files fetched from ConfTool using get_conftool_data.py.
  • HTMLhere we temporarily store the HTML versions of the abstracts.
  • LaTeXin here we build the actual PDF file for the book of abstract and daily session plans.
    • Book_of_abstracts the actual book of abstracts is built in here.
      • Contributions the TeX files for the program items are put here to separate static content from auto-generated content.
        • Logos this holds the GAMM logo for the title pages. Institutional logos could go here, too.
    • Commonstyle files etc., used by both documents
    • Daily_Scientific_Program the overview of all sessions in PDF format is generated here.

REST API data fetcher

get_conftool_data.py

This is a script connecting to the ConfTool Pro instance via ConfTool's REST API. It relies on the hidden files

  • .secret (containing the Passphrase for the REST API from ConfTool's export settings for the event)
  • .url (containing the URL of the event in ConfTool)

residing in the same directory. The script stores the files

  • abstracts.csv
  • contributions.csv
  • sessions.csv
  • speakers.csv
  • organizers.csv

in the CSV directory. The actual generator only uses sessions.csv and organizers.csv, the others can be useful for consistency checks, as ConfTool adds hints where it suspects duplicates.

To fill .url and .secret, first you need to enable the REST interface of ConfTool Pro. Otherwise access is disabled. To enable the interface go to:

Overview => Data Import and Export => Integrations With Other Systems

Scroll down to "Enable General REST Interface" to define a shared passphrase and enable the interface. The passphrase must have at least 8 characters. This passphrase then goes into .secret as its only content.

Below the field you can also find the URL of the REST interface. It looks like the following: https://www.conftool.org/gammYYYY/rest.php. Where YYYY stands for the year of your GAMM instance. Copy this URL into the .url file.

BoA_DSP_generator.py

This is the actual generator script that can be run once the CSV files have been fetched. It does three things:

  • prepare the BookOfAbstracts.tex in the Book_of_abstracts folder, and its includes for all sessions in the Contributions subfolder.
  • prepare the Daily_Scientific_Program.tex in the Daily_Scientific_Program folder.
  • For each room listed in the schedule, produce a separate TeX file with the room schedule of the week in the Daily_Scientific_Program/rooms folder.

html2latex.py

This a simple module containing the single function html2latex for cleaning out a selection of HTML tags. It can be extended by additional tags as required. There are also a PyPI and some GitHub projects by the same name that we decided to avoid here as they have been unattended or even archived.

check_html_tags.py

The script check_html_tags.py is not necessary for the generation of the above TeX files, but it checks if all HTML tags used in the CSV files are covered by html2latex.py.

Book of abstracts

The actual book of abstracts is prepared in the aforementioned subfolder. To customize colors and logos for the current years GAMM, simply update the file this-gamm.sty Setting the appropriate colors, date information and logos. Also replace the cover-image by your image of choice. Note that the image can have any file format supported by the graphicx package, but will be forced (without keeping the aspect ratio) into a 4:3 frame on the title page.

Daily Session plans

The daily session plan relies on a couple of choices regarding the implementation and naming of of the schedule items in the ConFTool setup of the conference. If you base your setup (e.g. by asking ConfTool for a data import) on the Setup of the 2024 edition of GAMM in Magdeburg, you should get this setup automatically. These settings are:

  • the short titles of all plenary sessions start with PL
  • the short titles of the Prandtl memorial lecture is PML
  • the short title(s) of the von Mises price lecture(s) start with RvML
  • the short titles of all minisymposium sessions start with MS
  • the short titles of all young researchers minis start with YRM
  • the short titles of all sessions for DFG programs start with DFG
  • the short titles of all parallel sessions start with S
  • the poster session(s) start with Poster

all sessions are either 1h or 2h long and non-plenary contributions are by default 20 minutes long. Topical speakers can have double slots, i.e. 40 minutes. In Minisymposia, 30 minutes presentations are allowed, but only if all talks in the session are 30 minutes long. Any other setting may (and likely will) break the logic of the generator.

Getting Started

Before starting the process, make sure to review the user data in the ConfTool. You will likely have to post-process a large number of submissions. Common mistakes are:

  • abstracts copy&pasted from PDF files, inheriting all line breaks and hyphenation
  • weird indentation, and wrong global formatting (entire abstracts in bold face or superscript)
  • inconsistencies and typos in affiliations

This is tedious and time-consuming, so best start early with this.

For the actual processing , make sure you have at least Python 3.10, with the pandas, requests and datetime modules installed. We recommend using a virtual environment for that. Also make sure to have a recent LaTeX installation (ideally also providing latexmk).

  1. Go to the main folder, where you also find this README.md create .url and .secret in this folder according to the instructions above, and execute get_conftool_data.py. Depending on your network connection, as well as the number of submissions and participants, this may take a short while.

  2. Once that has finished you can switch to the LaTeX folder. Update this-gam.sty according to your needs, here.

  3. Now go to the Book_of_abstracts folder and try running pdflatex on the BookOfAbstracts.tex. This has some probability to fail, as ConfTool allows full UTF-8 input in the abstract submission and not all incompatible letters or hidden whitespace letters may be covered in the utf8_clean function translating them to appropriate LaTeX transcriptions. Extend the function in the BoA_DSP_generator.py file as needed and rerun that in the top-level directory. Once it succeeds run makeindexto generate the alphabetical authors index, followed by pdflatex again to include it. Alternatively, directly run latexmk on the BookOfAbstracts.tex to automate the procedure.

  4. Now go to Daily_Scientific_Program and repeat the above for Daily_Scientific_Program.tex.

  5. Finally, change to the rooms folder and also compile all TeX files there.

The same can be achieved using the RunMe.sh on Linux, and RunMe.bat on Windows, once both .url and .secret have been created. These also feature command-line options to build only selected PDFs.

RunMe.py

RunMe.py is the main driver for the PDF build processes. It can be influenced by the following options:

-h, -?, --help print thid documentation to screeen and exit. -b, --boa compile only the book of abstracts PDF -d, --dsp compile only the daily scientific programm PDF -r, --rooms compile only the room plans PDF

-a, --all compile all PDFs (this is equivalent to no option at all)

-m, --withMises include the von Mises Lecturer(s) This should only be used after they have been officially announced. Also, this option needs to be used together with one of the above options

Usage examples:

to simply build all PDFs before the Mises Lecturers have been announced, and their details added to the ConfTool, simply run

RunMe.py

Whereas after the announcements, if you want to quickly update the room plans the following are equivalent:

RunMe.py --rooms -withMises
RunMe.py -r -m
RunMe.py -rm