Springer's middot character

Question

In the "Springer Guidelines for Authors of Proceedings", I found that:

Keywords: Please list your keywords here. They should be separated by middots, if possible. ...

So I assume that the LaTeX source should look like

\keywords{keyword1 \middot keyword2 \middot ... }

What is the magic \middot here? Note that I made up the \middot command here and I am actually looking for a correct latex command to substitute it.

I would like to avoid $\cdot$ and I tried \textperiodcentered bud then there is no space between the dot and the following keyword. And typing \textperiodcentered~ also seems rather cumbersome.

Can anyone suggest what LaTeX command is expected? Surprisingly, I was not able to find it in Springer's documentation.

Answer 1

Recently, I was asked to confirm my paper in Springer (office in India). The typesetter has corrected the keywords separator from comma to so-called middle dot, see in UTF U+00B7. This symbol was inputted directly as utf symbol, you can simply copy it from here · into your tex-file.

One can check the UTF code of a symbol in the internet, e.g. here. The detailed discussion about dots in Latex is given on this web-page.

Answer 2

This example is found in a sample file that comes along with the author kit for some conference:

\keywords{First keyword \and Second keyword \and Another keyword}

This should result in a list of keywords separated by 'middots' as long as you use the llncs class file.