Adobe's Acrobat suite of software allows one to process postscript files into their PDF (Portable Document Format) which is suitable for electronic publication. The postscript is converted with the `Distiller' which also builds `thumbnails' (icon-like versions of each page), and an index for all words that it can recover from the postscript. In order to recognise words in the document, the postscript file must have been created using non-bitmapped fonts.
Each PDF file carries a set of information containing a title, the author name, subject and keywords. Acrobat Exchange is another tool which is used in the production of the final document. It allows one to insert hypertext links either within the document (called bookmarks) or to other documents. It also allows one to move/insert/replace/crop pages and cut and paste but one cannot change the text.
Acrobat Catalog creates indexes across many documents and allows boolean searches on the document's header information as well as the text on the pages.
All that the user requires is a reader, and these are in the public domain for several platforms.
The aim for the EPAC CD-ROM is to have the following:
The quality of the visual image depends on the platform/display capabilities and on the type of font used. In general, bit-mapped fonts are extremely difficult to read except at the largest magnifications, they also slow down the performance considerably. This is because the bit-mapped fonts are designed to be rendered at a single resolution, like 300 or 600 DPI, but it is only on a computer screen where the resolution varies and the effect is noticeable.
Another key factor in the speed with which a page is displayed is the size of the file. Apart from text which is using bit-mapped fonts, a page is displayed very quickly. Graphics and illustrations can be painfully slow if the files are too big.
The Distiller places the text/images which are described in the postscript on a page which is of a pre-determined size. For EPAC we wish to set this to correspond to A4 size paper but when our colleagues in the USA want to print on their own standard (US letter) size paper we want the result to be reasonable. The height of the text is defined for all contributions (241mm) and normally one would centre this on the page. This results in different bottom margins for the two sizes of paper and when they are converted to PDF, the A4 text will appear higher on the page. This situation is made worse when someone in the USA wants to print a paper from the PDF file.
The solution which we have adopted is to have different margins for the two paper sizes so that the text area is of the same size and the lower left corner is the same distance from the edge of the sheet for both sizes. A printout of the postscript file looks a little strange but the electronically printed version will be much better.
WORD and LaTeX2e are preferred by the editorial team. Experience at the Chamonix Workshop on LEP Performance was very good, with LaTeX with 90% of the documents successfully processed at the first attempt. The WORD documents were only 50% successful but this is in stark contrast with experience at the 1994 Advanced Accelerator Concepts Workshop and PAC'95. For these other proceedings, most of the LaTeX prepared papers had used bit-mapped fonts and had to be re-worked.
We hope that with the use of suitable fonts (e.g. Times, Symbol and Zapf Dingbats) with LaTeX2e the problems will be greatly reduced. The problems with WORD arose largely because it is not possible to enforce a style and it is hoped that, as authors become accustomed to producing papers for electronic publication, this will improve.
It is acceptable for authors to use other software to prepare their papers but they will then have to be careful to follow the layout instructions and conventions and be sure that their postscript files will be acceptable.
Type 1 Computer Modern Fonts with Textures do not process well - the result is not useful.
EPS figures from Illustrator or Photoshop do not fit correctly in LaTeX documents.
PCX format (PC figures) in LaTeX documents -- use EPS.