Measuring Resource Efficiency of LATEX Paper Templates

Scientific work is mostly communicated via scientific papers, which are often published in journals or conference proceedings, either in print or digital form. These journals and conferences usually demand that submitted papers follow a specific formatting style, for which they provide style templates. The choice of a template influences different properties of the generated document, like its file size or the number of pages that it would use in printed form, directly affecting its impact on the environment. We built a system to automatically compare different LATEX templates with regard to different factors relevant to the environmental impact. We test our approach with seven templates used by different conferences and journals, and find that the most efficient templates have roughly one third of the file size, and require about one half of the resources for paper production of the least efficient templates.