Publishing Electronically

Choosing a Format

Whether you author your paper using LaTeX, Framemaker, Word or some other language or tool, you must convert it to a format that is accessible to your audience. The three best choices are:

HTML

Publishing your document in HTML makes it easy to find and read online and ensures the widest possible audience. In many cases, converting to HTML can be done automatically with good results. But the conversion to HTML always changes the layout of the paper, eliminating page breaks, altering line breaks and fonts and shifting figures. In most cases the content remains the same, but the look of the original paper is lost. In some cases, HTML can be more difficult for the reader to print. It's usually a good idea to include a PDF or Postscript version along with the HTML version.

PDF (Portable Document Format)

PDF (also known as Adobe Acrobat Format), is the most universally accessible format on the web owing to the free and widely used Adobe Acrobat Reader program. If it is at all possible to make your document available in pdf format, do it.

Postscript

Postscript used to be the file format of choice for electronic publishing. It is widely understood by printers, but less widely used by people outside the UNIX world. Many people who use Windows or MacOS may not know what to do with a postscript file. Still, postscript is a useful format for most technical people, and it has been around a long time, so it will only surprise internet newcomers.

Web Publishing

Publishing a paper in the web involves nothing more than placing it, physically, in the web, and creating a link to it. The process is the same for any file format.

Where in the web to put it? There are no agreed-upon standards for this yet, but the most obvious places are:

• Your personal web page
• Your research group's web page
• Your research project web page

Technical Reports

The Computer Science Department publishes all technical reports in electronic form only. All technical reports are made available via both anonymous FTP and the web. They are also indexed by the NCSTRL (Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library) system.

How To Publish a Report

Prepare two files:

• Abstract - a plain text file that contains
  • Title
  • Author(s)
  • Abstract
• Report - a pdf file

Suppose these are named abstract.txt and report.pdf. Run this command: Make sure /local/bin/ is in your path.

% tr_submit abstract.txt report.pdf

Your report will be assigned a tech report number and placed in the web and on the ftp archive. You should receive an email confirmation within a day.

See also the man pages for tr_submit(1), tr_list(1) and tr_print(1).