Once the paper was accepted and APCs paid by my former employer, it was time to put the paper under their style file, which proved hard without a lot of silly work. So I decided to tell them I can’t make my paper compile with their old template, so they have to do something themselves, for instance, modernized the template. They said well, send us the files, we’ll fix them. OK, I got galley proofs eventually, and well, they are absolute horror. I suspect them using a convertor to Word, making all the spacing and all the formulae look like total sh*t, apart from typos, typos… I said no, fix this – they replied with a corporate hogwash about fonts being just fine, etc.

I had to create a small LaTeX file using the old template to show how bad the typesetting I got in their proofs. Still waiting for a reply from them…

Hi Sam, thank you for paying attention to our work, and I appreciate getting the word out. I think our work speaks for itself. It’s a bit technical and is still in progress obviously, so getting a few sentence summary suitable for MO is difficult I am afraid.

If you want a “natural” problem of this kind — I have thought about it for awhile and only have conjectural answers. In my paper “Equality cases of the Alexandrov–Fenchel inequality…” with SH Chan, for k=0 and 1 the positivity problem of the defect of the Stanley poset inequality is in P but the counting conjecturally is not in #P.

In this note with Colleen, see last paragraph of §3.1, we reference another example from a different paper with SH where the positivity is NP-complete but the counting is conjecturally not in #P. The reason I have to keep using “conjecturally” is because we don’t have (yet?) a technology to prove “not in #P” results without proving that positivity is not in PH. I am working on it…