Experience with the use of Acrobat in the CAJUN publishing project

Adobe's Acrobat software, released in June 1993, is based around a new Portable Document Format (PDF) which offers the possibility of being able to view and exchange electronic documents, independent of the originating software, across a wide variety of supported hardware platforms (PC, Macintosh, Sun UNIX etc.). The fact that Acrobat's imageable objects are rendered with full use of Level 2 PostScript means that the most demanding requirements can be met in terms of high-quality typography and device-independent colour. These qualities will be very desirable components in future multimedia and hypermedia systems. The current capabilities of Acrobat and PDF are described; in particular the presence of hypertext links, bookmarks, and yellow sticker annotations (in release 1.0) together with article threads and multi-media plugins in version 2.0, This article also describes the CAJUN project (CD-ROM Acrobat Journals Using Networks) which has been investigating the automated placement of PDF hypertextual features from various front-end text processing systems. CAJUN has also been experimenting with the dissemination of PDF over e-mail, via World Wide Web and on CDROM.

In-house Preparation of Examination Papers using troff, tbl, and eqn.

Starting in December 1982 the University of Nottingham decided to phototypeset almost all of its examination papers `in house' using the troff, tbl and eqn programs running under UNIX. This tutorial lecture highlights the features of the three programs with particular reference to their strengths and weaknesses in a production environment. The following issues are particularly addressed: Standards -- all three software packages require the embedding of commands and the invocation of pre-written macros, rather than `what you see is what you get'. This can help to enforce standards, in the absence of traditional compositor skills. Hardware and Software -- the requirements are analysed for an inexpensive preview facility and a low-level interface to the phototypesetter. Mathematical and Technical papers -- the fine-tuning of eqn to impose a standard house style. Staff skills and training -- systems of this kind do not require the operators to have had previous experience of phototypesetting. Of much greater importance is willingness and flexibility in learning how to use computer systems.