Robot rush

Well we’re just a few days away from robot paper deadline and there’s still some work to be done! While robot-PI is still editing the paper, I had an unfortunate realization with some of the work I had done that requires me to go in and fix a few things. So once again, I’m doing things as hard as possible.

When we resubmit robot paper, I will need to include everything, the revisions highlighted in the manuscript in PDF form, our response letter, the actual file of the document (it’s in LaTeX), and the figures. Since this is a design paper, there are a LOT of figures. I think we’re at ~26 or so if I’m recalling correctly and that’s after we removed four of them for clarity sake.

Which brings me to my mistake! I needed to send a nice compact file to robot-PI for review. Currently the “full” version of the document with our high resolution photos is roughly 150 MB. Huge to be sending back and forth via email and truthfully when we submit it, there is a max file size we need to be cognizant about.

Some of the edits I needed to make involved redoing several of the figures, which is fine since I still somehow have copies of all the figures I made (keep ahold of your work kids, it will come back eventually). The story goes a bit like this, make the changes to the figures, finish editing the document, export as a PDF, notice the file size is huge. Then I had one of my bright ideas to resize all the figures to be smaller. This reduces the file size since each figure is 2-3 MB and thus it adds up in the paper, so by shrinking the figures to roughly half their size or smaller we get very tiny file sizes and the PDF ends up being a normal(ish) size.

In the end I sent off the document in both LaTeX and PDF version to robot-PI for revisions and review. Yesterday when I was gathering everything together I realized my mistake. No spoilers if you’ve already figured it out!

We have a seperate folder full of our high resolution figures so shrinking the files made perfect sense to me. It doesn’t change the final submission since those aren’t the same figures. Except, those aren’t where I put the figures I modified. Those were in the main folder which I shrunk down so I could send off. Yep… the figures I modified, my beautiful, beautiful figures, are super tiny now. All that work, for nothing.

The good news is I can redo the figures again, that isn’t so much of a problem, it just takes a lot of time and time is something I do not have right now! Especially these next few days. With several experiments lined up, meetings, and other work that needs to be addressed, I’m going to be busy!

Basically it’s going to mean a few late nights and a bit of stress between now and the Wednesday (already extended) deadline. I just hope I get a response from robot-PI soon because the last thing I want to do is keep pushing this paper back. I feel like we’re finally so close to publication, it would be a shame to fall flat now.