Teaser figures in ACL template papers

0_How to make a teaser figure for ACL.md

Suppose you want to put a full-width figure at the top of your ACL paper, as seen in the example below.

The \figure*{} macro does not work to insert a full-width figure above the abstract in the ACL template for some reason. Thus, we need to hack together a command that does it for us.

This command does a few things:

• Breaks out of the document rendering defined by the ACL template with strip
• Manually implements a hacked Figure macro with manually-written "Figure 1:", manual font size setting, etc.
• Manually sets the figure count variable to not duplicate "Figure 1"

0_z_cccl_example.png

1_acl_teaser_fig.tex

%%%%%%%%% in preamble %%%%%%%%%

% to make \strip work
\usepackage{cuted}
\usepackage{hyperref}

% hack commands to create a centered `\incudegraphics`-like macro that doesn't cause weird errors
\newcommand{\adjustimg}{% Horizontal adjustment of image
  \hspace*{\dimexpr\evensidemargin-\oddsidemargin}%
}
\newcommand{\centerimg}[2][width=\textwidth]{% Center an image
  \makebox[\textwidth]{\adjustimg\includegraphics[#1]{#2}}%
}

2_usage.md

Once we have defined our figure commands in the preamble and imported relevant packages, we insert the figure at the top of our document, before \begin{abstract} is written.

3_teaser_fig.tex

%%%%%%%%% in document %%%%%%%%%

%%% before abstract %%%

\begin{strip}
  % set this to something that looks good.
  \vspace{-58pt}

  % we use the centerimg macro here instead of \includegraphics to make the text on the rest of this fake figure macro correctly render
    \noindent\centerimg[width=\linewidth]{TEASER_FIG}

  % Note: we need to manually write the text "Figure 1:" here as we aren't actually using the "figure" macro.
  \fontsize{10pt}{12pt}\selectfont
    Figure 1: TEASER CAPTION HERE
  \label{fig:teaser}

\end{strip}

% because we manually made a figure without the macro, we need to increment the figure counter so that the next one is Figure 2
\setcounter{figure}{1}

%%% start abstract %%%

4_referencing.md

Because we didn't produce this inside of the figure macro, using \ref{}, \cref{}, and \autorref won't work! Instead, we have to use this hack:

5_referencing.tex

% replacing ref
...in Figure \hyperref[fig:teaser]{1}...

% replacing autorref
...in \hyperref[fig:teaser]{Figure 1}...

etc

6_sources.md

I worked out how to do most of this hack myself just consulting stackoverflow and documentation of the commands. The one exception was figuring out the \adjustimg and \centerimg commands could be used to replace \centering, which was necessary to avoid this super annoying bug where the text placement doesn't "see" the image and instead they superimpose on each other.

I found the exact code I needed for this in an answer provided by "Werner" on StackOverflow. Thank you Werner, you absolute chad.