FAQs and Tips on Subaru Telescope Proposal Submission

1. Why No Response to My Inquiry?

If you send an inquiry mail to (the address exclusive for electronic proposal submission), it would probably be buried in a mass of proposal+SPAM mails without being noticed, since mails sent to this address are automatically processed. Any personal question should be addressed to

2. Why No Response to My Proposal Submission?

Usually, our Proposal Management System (ProMS) will return a response mail (whichever acknowledgement of receipt or warning message of errors) to any proposal submission mail sent to .
So, in case you receive no reply mail at all (e.g., even after ca. 1 hour), it is highly probable that your submission mail has been regarded as a SPAM mail. In such circumstances, you must find out if there is anything wrong with your submited files, and then try to resend appropriately modified ones.

We would suggest to check the following two points first, since these are the most frequently seen troubles.

2-1. Did you send the application form correctly as a LaTeX source?

Some careless proposers send us two PDF files: one for the application form generated by LaTeX-compilation and one for scientific justification. Such a mail without a legitimate LaTeX application form (text file) is automatically regarded as a SPAM. So, please make sure that one "text" file (application form) and one "PDF" file (scientific justification) are to be submitted.

2-2. Aren't you using a ProMS-incompatible exotic mailer?

There is no guarantee that our ProMS can respond to any encoding system used by every mailing softwares, although we are continually trying to update our system for new mailers. If, unfortunately, your submission mail happened to be sent by such an incompatible mailer, ProMS may misunderstand your proposal mail to be just as one of junk mails. Since there is no quick remedy for this, we would recommend proposers to adopt any one of widely-used popular mailers or follow the classical way using the UNIX/Linux mail command (cf. the example on the web page).

3. Why Mysterious LaTeX Compiling Errors?

Often seen are the following two troubles:

3-1. Inclusion of 2-byte characters

If you include 2-byte characters (e.g., Japanese "zenkaku" characters) in your LaTeX source code, error messages will return, since our LaTeX system does not support such characters. (An occasonally seen case difficult to detect is the inclusion of the 2-byte "blank" character.) Using text editors such as vi or emacs on UNIX/Linux may sometimes be helpful to find out those characters to avoid.

3-2. Frivolous change of the command format

You must not change the command format of the LaTeX source (e.g., by breaking or joining the \tagname field), since it would lead to compiling errors.
For example, the "name" entry in "template.tex" is formatted with three lines as
\PIfirstname{Taro}
\PImidinitial{}
\PIlastname{Yamada}.
If, however, these were forcedly combined into one line as
\PIfirstname{Taro} \PImidinitial{} \PIlastname{Yamada},
it will lead to errors when compiled.

Anyway, in case that you could not trace the origin of errors by any effort, please do not hesitate to write to .
We will try to give you an adequate advice.

4. Miscellaneous Tips

4-1. The early bird catches the worm

It is not uncommon that your first submission trial ends up with failure. Just try to find out the cause of errors and resubmit again. We are always ready to respond to any specific questions in case of trouble and help the proposers to accomplish successful submission. Please keep in mind, however, that we may not be able to promptly reply on the deadline day (especially within a few hours before the deadline time), when we always experience "inflation" of submissions and inquiries; i.e., any deliberate support can not be guaranteed on this extremely busy day for us. Accordingly, we strongly recommend to avoid submission on the deadline day, when we (as well as you) do not have sufficient time to contend with any trouble. If you try to complete submission at least 1-2 days before the deadline, we bet you will end up with success.

4-2. Deadline is set in Japan Standard Time (JST)

Note that our submission deadline is set just at noon (12:00) in JST, which is ahead of UT by 9 hours. However, some applicants (many in western countries), presumably mistaking this deadline date as if in UT (or even in their local time), occasionally send submission mails well after the deadline. Please be aware not to make such a careless mistake. We never accept any submission which arrived after the deadline.