Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sdd.hp.com!spool.mu.edu!uunet!maverick.ksu.ksu.edu!harv
From: harv@cis.ksu.edu (Harvard Townsend)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Producing Conference Proceedings
Keywords: conference proceedings, Framemaker, troff, LaTeX, figures, OCR
Message-ID: <1991Mar6.210709.28109@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu>
Date: 6 Mar 91 21:07:09 GMT
Sender: news@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu (The News Guru)
Followup-To: comp.text
Organization: Kansas State University, Department of Computing and Information Sciences
Lines: 40

I have been assigned to help put together the conference proceedings for a
major ACM conference next year (the call for papers has already gone out).
I am interested in other people's experience with such an endeavor. 
Ideally, we would like an attractive, uniform end product in both hardcopy
and on-line form with minimal time and expense since it is a volunteer
project (what a dreamer, you say! Actually, my boss is the dreamer). :-)
So, what are your experiences? We use Framemaker, troff, and LaTeX locally,
and have access to Interleaf. For figures in troff and LaTeX papers, we 
generate the figures with Fig and include them with psfig. It would
therefore be helpful to use one of these tools for the final product, but
we can certainly learn something new if there are better solutions.

As it stands now, I anticipate having authors submit one hard copy and one
electronic copy of their final paper. The electronic copy would be a simple
ASCII file for the text part, and then have figures separate in whatever
format they want. We would suggest preferred formats (pic, fig, postscript)
but take anything. If we cannot incorporate their electronic format into
our final proceedings, then we would scan it in from the hardcopy.
So what have other people done? Here are some other questions that come to
mind:

- What formats are professional journals requiring these days? How many are
    accepting electronic submissions, and in what formats? How do they handle
    figures?
- Anyone ever try OCR from hardcopy? How reliable is this? Does it take more
    time to check for errors than it is worth? Any pointers to OCR vendors
    or publications where I can read about it?
- How about getting a vendor to donate their wp software, then providing a
    disk to the authors with that software on it. The authors then generate
    the final paper on the disk with that software and return the disk to us.
- How about display systems for on-line copies so that viewers can see the
    figures as well as the text in the published format? Hypertext would be
    fun and useful in such an application.
- How about copyrights and electronic distribution of the papers?
- How about volunteers who want to do this for me? :-)
--
Harvard Townsend, Systems Manager, Dept. of Computing & Information Sciences 
Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS 66506   (913)532-6350
Internet: harv@cis.ksu.edu    UUCP: rutgers!ksuvax1!harv