for academic papers

This turned out to be a long rant, so here's a summary for the impatient:
1. Whitespace is your friend, not your enemy. Having neatly typeset text in a sea of white invites the readers to go through your content. Focus on making the content better and let the background whitespace do its job of helping readers along as they read through things that are usually dry to read if you are not the author :) Don't try tricks to reduce whitespace.
2. There are different types of content - normal text & floats; mixing them distracts the reader's eyes, which is never a good thing. Traditional LaTeX wisdom advises people not to overuse bold and italics because indiscriminately mixing different kinds of text distracts readers. The same principle can be generalised to floats & text. Avoid mixing them.

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(Ruminations after submitting a paper to hotnets).

Up against strict page limits, scientific authors resort to all sorts of tricks to squeeze more content in, like decreasing the font size or increasing margins. But this misses the point. It does not matter if you manage to squeeze 300 more characters into the page limit. If it is badly typeset or badly written, readers wont feel like getting through your paper.

Of course, if you use good LaTeX style files, you can't go terribly wrong. But there are still a few points worth keeping in mind:

• Never change sentence constructions 2 hours before a conference deadline, just to decrease the line count of a paragraph or pull the last line over the edge. The prior construction is almost always better because more thought had gone into writing it and because it was not written with a deadline looming near.
• Do not continuously look for more space. The illusion of having lesser space will encourage precise writing. So, for instance, use single column writing in earlier drafts.
• When you need more space, try to create more by rewriting earlier sentences in a crisper fashion, rather than by decreasing fonts and/or fudging with bibliography styles.
• conclusions are often a good place to look for space -- remember the golden rule that conclusions should not repeat things said in the introduction or abstract. (I am usually guilty of ignoring this one.)
• After rewriting the conclusion, try placing a \small command before the bibliography. In my opinion, the references section is horribly hyphenated with normal font size, and \small makes it look a lot better.
  
• Design good captions for figures & tables. A good rule of thumb is that captions should be understandable on their own, after the reader has gone through the introduction section. Good captions are concise, and complement rather than repeat the content that talks about the figure.
• Figures are "floats" and disrupt the flow of reading. Place them at the top-right or top (if it should fill both columns) of the page where the figures are discussed. Readers should be able to take in the figure with a glance as they are reading the content discussing the figure. If possible, the figure should appear just before the content that talks about it, and this would be a good enough reason to place a figure on the top-left.
  
• If a bunch of figures are related, collect them together and place them in the top half of a page, with appropriate captions. Readers can go through the figs separately from the text. Most good journals in other sciences seem to do this (Nature; Science etc), but unfortunately CS articles are typeset by authors, and there are no firm conventions.
  
• Be careful in using the "here" or h option (e.g. \begin{figure}[htbp]) with figures and tables. LaTeX sometimes places the float after one line of text on a new column or page. Readers skimming through your paper will easily miss that line. Especially in "evaluation" or "simulation" sections which are usually littered with graphs, little lines of text can get lost between giant figures and column beginnings.