[sanskritabelt]

"There is no strict separation of content and style. This is mostly an issue for publishers that want to ensure a consistent style across articles in a journal. With LaTeX, academic authors can always reduce the margins or change the interline spacing to be able to squeeze in more half-truths."

Does this ever happen?

[arnsholt]

In my research group, there's a story that one of their collaborators once tweaked the interline spacing to get under the page limit. Apparently the end result was that you could riffle through the printed proceeding and tell where his article was, just because the pages were darker.

So yeah, it probably happens. If it's half an hour before the submission deadline and there are four lines left on the page you have to cut, you'll do what you have to to get the job done. =)

[qznc]

What I do to save space in papers: Squeeze figures, shorten pseudo code, remove paragraph breaks, and finally decrease font size of bibliography.

[jimhefferon]

People I know who work in the math publishing area say that one of the main problems they have is un-tweaking authors's sources. So, yes.

[jmmcd]

I know lots of people who do it with conference papers (including those published and nominally typeset and printed by Springer), and it's easy to spot. I haven't seen anyone get away with obvious tweaks in journal papers.

When my papers get too long, I take it as an opportunity to obsess over superfluous words and sentences.

[koralatov]

And more to the point, shouldn't this be caught by a sub-editor prior to publishing? I find it incredibly hard to believe that publishers would blindly publish what they're sent without first checking it...

[sanskritabelt]

My thoughts exactly. Someone at the publisher is looking at a lot of similarly formatted documents, any deviation should stand out.

And isn't separating content from style what a .sty file is supposed to do anyway?

[gammarator]

People do it, although there are more elegant (and honest) means of squeezing space. I summarized some of them after having to do a drastic cut of a proposal at the last minute: http://bellm.org/blog/2013/02/24/making-space-in-latex-docum...