Preparing Electronic Books

Edward J. WegmanCenter for Computational Statistics

George Mason University

This talk is based on joint work with Amy Braverman of JPL.

Outline of Talk

Principles Software Structure

Demonstration Lessons Learned

Some Principles

CD based Commonly available file structure

Adobe .pdf, Quicktime .mov, .mpg, .jpg, .gif, .tif Interfaces

Web browser-based interfaceAcrobat reader interface

Why CD (or in future DVD)? Physical Object (like book) and Archival

Web access fragile Network failure Hard drive failure Webmaster moves on

Searchable Multimedia

Color graphics and images Animations and movies and sound Code and data (text, Excel, Access) Presentations (PowerPoint) Print version an option

Software Text Processing

MS Word http://www.microsoft.com/

WinEdt 5.3 (for Tex and LaTex) http://www.winedt.com/

EXP 5.0.2 http://www.expswp.com/

GhostView for Windows (for PostScript files) http://www.ghostscript.com/ http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/

Software CD Preparation

Adobe Acrobat 4.0 (5.0) and Acrobat Distiller http://www.adobe.com/

MS Photo Editor http://www.microsoft.com/

Macromedia Dreamweaver MX http://www.macromedia.com/

Button Studio 1.45 http://www.interkodex.com/

Autoplay Pro Menu Studio 3.0 http://www.indigorose.com/

Roxio Easy CD Creator 5.0 http://www.roxio.com/

Structure of CD Basic Directory Types

Proceedings Folder Contains folders for each contributor

Abstract or paper, presentation (ppt,pdf), other files

HTML Folder Contains an html file for each contributor linking to their contribution

Web Folder Contains website

Photo Folder Contains Images

Structure of CD Basic High Level Files

index.html Front end for web access

master.pdf Book image of proceedings

Acrobat allows search, linkage internally and externally, pagination

autorun.exe Initiates disk on Windows platforms Automatically generates a data directory

Miscellaneous image files for index.html and autorun.exe

Demonstration

Lessons Learned No double column format. Keep abstracts in text or MS Word. Keep code in text files. Allow postscript submissions as last resort. Ditto pdf submissions with embedded fonts. Check MS Word/PowerPoint submissions carefully for

mismatched/uninstalled fonts. Encourage submissions of presentations even if no paper. Stay out of this business.

Rewarding but labor intensive.

Contact Information

Edward J. WegmanCenter for Computational StatisticsGeorge Mason University MS 4A7

Fairfax, VA 22030-4444

(703) 993-1691ewegman@gmu.edu