The following formatting rules are most often abused by authors and thus merit special attention:

1. Use Times Roman fonts or their equivalent. For example, in MS Word use Times New Roman or in LaTeX use the default font Computer Modern Roman.
2. The title of the article should be in 16-point-bold Times Roman font and centered on the text field. Capitalize the title as you would a normal sentence, that is, capitalize only the first word, and proper nouns or acronyms.
3. Authors' names and affiliations should be in 12-point-normal Times Roman font and centered. Do not use italics or a bold font. A blank line should separate the author list from the title and from the affiliations. Try to format these fields according to the examples found on the web pages mentioned below.
4. For the normal text of the document, use 10-point-normal Times Roman font. Use single spacing between lines, which means that the vertical spacing between text baselines should be about 4.2 mm. Justify the text to both the right and left margins. Paragraphs should be indented (about 5 mm) and should have an extra half-space separation between them.
5. Section headings should be in 11-point-bold Times Roman font, all characters in upper case, and centered. Section headings should be consecutively numbered. Follow the SPIE format for subsection headings.
6. The abstract should be a single paragraph summarizing the main points of the paper and should contain no more than 200 words.

The formatting tools available for LaTeX (http://kmh-lanl.hansonhub.com/spie/) and Microsoft Word (http://kmh-lanl.hansonhub.com/spie/msword.html) may be helpful. These web pages also include detailed formatting instructions and examples of a properly formatted manuscript.