About the Proceedings
About Publishing the Proceedings
Objective
Publishing the proceedings of the Reuse Workshop had 2 objectives: first to give an official reference to the accepted
papers; second to be able to access the papers at any time in the future. Everyone knows that maintaining the
availability of Web documents is not that easy. I wanted to be able to migrate the proceedings from one place to another
very easily (ie. as one file) which would not be the case if they were kept in HTML format.
PostScript generation
The idea was to do as little editing as possible and to keep the papers mostly in the form they had when submitted in
HTML. The PostScript files were generated from HTML files, using the print command of Netscape 4.03 on a Unix station. The reasons were:
- The PostScript generated from Unix is cleaner than the one generated from Windows (further processing as page numbering or file concatenation, was not working in the latter). It has to be noticed that PostScript files generated on Unix are 10 to 20 times larger than on Windows, which was a serious concern. However when files are compressed the ratio falls to 1.2 which was eventually acceptable.
- The print command allows for selecting A4 format, which is not possible using the "Save as" option (Netscape on
Windows does not even offer PostScript format as a "Save as" option).
- A empty page have to be included at the end of a paper with a odd number of pages. It is done just by adding a second
showpage at the end of the PostScript file for those papers.
Some editing
Although I did not wanted to do so, I ended editing some papers, either because they used a too small font (the print command does not take in account the display font options), or to improve the position of page returns (a figure and its caption on 2 different pages was unacceptable). There are still some titles appearing at the bottom of pages, I am afraid. It is well known that HTML was not designed for document publishing.
It would have been nice to justify paragraphs, but I gave up. Some papers are justified, though, as they have been
generated from Word (as written in their Meta tags). The resulting HTML is otherwise terrible: nothing is perfect.
Page numbers
Page numbers were added using the following command (thanks to Daniel de Rauglaudre):
cat numpages-ps2.ps file1.ps > file2.ps
The number of the first page can be set to any page number by editing the first line of the file numpages-ps2.ps .
The proceedings have been assembled for your convenience by Anne-Marie Vercoustre. It required more effort than I was
ready to spend on when I started.
back to Reuse Workshop page
last modified: 30 July 1998