65. LaTeX for 2013 ARC proposals

If you're in the limbo where you're not quite expert enough with LaTeX, but have happily said goodbye to MS Office, and you're an Australia scientist who annually has to fight the endless bureaucracy of the Australian Research Council (seriously -- 10 page limit about the science, followed by 70 pages about personal qualities?) you may find that you're in for a lot of grief.

If you collaborate with other people you will have to settle for a file format everyone can deal with ('everyone' except linux users), which is likely to be Word run in a virtual environment. If you're writing by yourself or together with more computer-savvy colleagues you will get away with using LaTeX for a fair number of the sections, while using gEdit for others.

I'm presuming that you will create a separate .tex file for each section.

The rules (http://www.arc.gov.au/ncgp/dp/dp_instructions.htm) says that you need

• Black type
• Single column
• A4
• 0.5 cm margin on all sides (top, bottom, right, left)
• A 'highly legible font', preferably 12 pt Times New Roman

Also, reading between the lines, you shouldn't/needn't include page numbers since this will be generated by the RMS.

\usepackage{nopageno}

with \pagestyle{plain} just after \begin{document} may do the trick.


Black type and single column are defaults in LaTeX, so need no action. Everything below goes into the preamble.

For A4 and 12 point font, set that in the documentclass

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{article}\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{amsfonts}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{mhchem}

For 0.5 cm margins on all sides 

\usepackage[margin=0.5cm]{geometry}

Additional for all sections:





\setlength\parindent{0pt} %no indent on first paragraph
\usepackage{fullpage} % an alternative if you don't need 0.5 cm margins
\author{} %we don't want author\date{} %we don't want date\begin{document}



Part C, section C1
Here you have several sections, such as AIMS AND BACKGROUND, RESEARCH PROJECT etc. To make sure that these DO NOT get numbered, use

\seccounter{secnumbdepth}{0}

Since the references are a separate document, set

\documentclass[10pt,a4paper]{article}

Part D is filled out online.

Part E, while a pain to write, uses regular 12 pt Times New Roman. If you don't want section numbering, use {secnumbdepth}{0}. If you want your sections to look like this

E1. Justification....

E2. Details of non-ARC contributions

Use

\seccounter{secnumbdepth}{1}\def\thesection{E\arabic{section}.}

As usual, this goes into the preamble, not the body. You should -- ideally -- never have to change the way you write. All changes should go into the documentclass style file or preamble.


Part F. Oh how we curse you.

F13.1 should be easy enough -- you can even skip sections and just use \title{F13.1. Justification} together with a \maketitle right after \begin{document}. Or you can use
\def\thesection{F13.\arabic{section.}


F14.2 offers potential for fun:

\setcounter{secnumdepth}{4}
\def\thesection{F14.2.\arabic{section}.}
\def\thesubsection{\alph{subsection})}
\title{F14.2 Recent significant publications (since 2007)}

This way if you put the following in the body:

\maketitle
\section{Research publications}
\subsection{Scholarly books}
\subsection{Scholarly book chapters}

you get

F14.2 Recent significant publications (since 2007)
F14.2.1. Research publications
a) Scholarly books 
b) Scholarly book chapters

For your reference list you may use 

25.* Blow, Joe; Doe, John; \textbf{Hill, Vera}. \emph{One page derivation of the GUT}, Phys. Rev., \textbf{2012}, \emph{108(3)}, 234-235 \\
For F14.3 use

\def\thesection{F\arabic{section}.}
\def\thesubsection{14.\arabic{subsection}}
without \maketitle but with 

\subsection{Ten career-best publications} 
in the body

G1 is difficult in latex if you want to do it properly. I gave up and used libreoffice for this one since I couldn't figure out how 



Put this in the preamble

\usepackage{rotating} %rotate text in narrow tables...\usepackage{array} % for vertical centering in tables...hacky...

and this in the body:
\section{Research support for Vera Hill}
\begin{table}[h]
 \begin{tabular}{b{4cm} p{0.5cm} p{0.5cm} l c  c c c c}
\textbf{ Description} & \begin{sideways}Same Research area \end{sideways}  &  \begin{sideways}Support type \end{sideways}& ARC Project ID & 2010 (k\$) & 2011 (k\$) & 2012 (k\$) & 2013 (k\$) & 2014 (k\$) \\
 \hline
 "Unifying general relativity with quantum mechanics" & N & C  & DP100202921 & 120 & 190 & 180 & 170 & 120 \\
 \hline
 \end{tabular}
\end{table}

It doesn't look quite right. You may also want to try e.g. m{0.5cm} for the rotated header captions The remaining sections should be fairly straightforward, formatting-wise. Ultimately, the ARC application process is one of the most ridiculous one I've had the misfortune to be subjected to.