Proceedings on CD - pdf-format

[Reinhold Leinfelder]

Not having been able this time to attend the meeting I would greatly 
welcome access already to the Bali proceedings both through the web 
and by CD. To have a compatible and easily printable format, html 
could be certainly used. However I would rather recommend using 
pdf-Files for both versions (web and CD). This would have the 
following advantages:
* opening and printing of files from all platforms would be possible 
(similar to pdf).
* file size is much smaller than e.g. for a .doc or .rtf-file 
(especially if the documents are converted into screen-optimized 
pdfs).
* when downloading a paper from the web, one paper would be one file 
only (unlike in html where text and figs are separated into different 
files)
*  formatting  of the paper could be done in any word processor, 
pagemaker or other software by the authors. After conversion to pdf, 
format would be maintained and would look similar to a printed 
version.
* The tool to read and print pdfs is free (Acrobat Reader) and could 
be included in any CD.
* Many servers provide full text indexing of pdf-files, so the whole 
proceedings could be searched in full text mode.

There is only one minor problem: Conversion from any other file 
format is fairly simple but needs the Acrobat software which costs 
money (except for the Mac where there is a shareware conversation 
tool called 'print to pdf'  or by using pagemaker which has 
pdf-format as an output option) . However, conversation into pdf 
could be even done on the fly on a server designed for this (by 
uploading a word processor file including figures via ftp to a 
'watched' directory, which then automatically transfers files into 
pdf-format).

Would be great to have already the Bali proceedings both on the web and on CD!

Regards

Reinhold Leinfelder

At 18:08 Uhr +0100 07.11.2000, GJ Gast wrote:
>...
>I have in Bali coined the idea of printing and distributing the symposium
>proceedings on CD. Some advantages I see:
>
>1. Printing costs of the paper version are about US$100,000 plus roughly
>US$20 on postage for each. A CD costs less than one dollar and postage is
>hardly more than a normal letter. With 1500 participants the paper version
>costs 130,000 and the CD version roughly 3000, an almost 98% reduction of
>the costs.
>
>2. CD's are now 900 MB, undoubtably larger in 4 years. So a 1000 authors
>will have about 1 MB each for their paper. A paper can be written in any
>format the author wishes. MS Word obviously, but why not in HTML as a
>web page? Colours can be used, tables, graphs, pictures, models,
>simulations and data sets as long as it fits the set amount of disk space. If
>the articles are burned on 2 CD's every author will have 2 MB. There is no
>limit.
>
>3. Lay-out of the papers can be done by the authors, which means a
>tremendous reduction of the work load for the symposium proceedings
>editor. This allows the publication of the proceedings a few months after the
>symposium rather than a few years.
>
>4. In the proceedings of the Bali meeting only 400 papers out of over a 1000
>oral contributions will be selected for publications. There is no 
>such reduction
>necessary when working with CD's.
>
>5. You can easily share your copy with your students or co-workers by
>placing it on the internal network or by simply burning copies.
>
>6. Even in the developing countries computers with CD ROM players are
>common now. Everybody can use a CD.
>
>7. If the structure of the CD is written in HTML the whole thing can easily be
>made available through a webpage as well.
>
>My two cents. Cheers, GJ.
-- 
********************************************

Reinhold Leinfelder
Universitaetsinstitut und Bayerische Staatssammlung fuer 
Palaeontologie und Historische Geologie, Palaeontologisches Museum
Richard-Wagner-Str. 10
D-80333 Muenchen
Germany
e-mail: r.leinfelder at lrz.uni-muenchen.de

phone: ++49-89-2180-6630
fax: ++49-89-2180-6601

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