The scientific and technical justification guidelines are given in Sections "Preparing the Scientific Justification" and "Technical Justification" of the Proposer's Guide.
The scientific justification must be submitted as a single PDF document. The total length of the PDF document is limited to 4 pages for Regular, ToO, Solar and mmVLBI proposals and to 6 pages for Large Program proposals (A4 or US Letter format), with a font size no smaller than 12 points. Proposers are free to adjust the length of the various proposal sections within this overall length limit. A file size limit of 20 MB will be enforced at submission. Accordingly, extremely large or complex figures may not be acceptable.
The recommended breakdown is 2 pages for the science case and 2 pages for figures, tables, and references, but proposers are free to adjust these numbers within the overall page limit. Large proposals are allowed an additional 2 pages to describe the management plan and data products. Figures and tables may be interleaved with the science case, so that they appear close to the location in the text where references are made to them. Although the Technical Justification for each Science Goal is entered in the OT, any figure required for it needs to be placed in the Science Justification PDF document.
Users are encouraged to use the LaTeX template developed by ALMA for preparation of their proposals.
The technical justification is entered directly into the OT in the Technical Justification node for each Science Goal. Each Technical Justification is split into four sections: Sensitivity, Imaging, Correlator configuration and Choices to be justified. In all cases, the justification texts must contain a minimum of 50 characters and no more than 4000 are allowed. Any figures associated with the Technical Justification must be included in the Science Justification PDF file.