Chapter 9: Case Studies
"Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example." -Mark Twain
In this chapter we will take a brief look at a number of real life projects. Each project has its own idiosyncrasies and unique constraints, but so do all publishing efforts. These case studies shed some light on the actual experiences of completed projects. These are not toy projects but fullfledged productions with realworld deadlines and problems.
The initial information on many of these projects was came from participants' answers to variations of the questions shown on the next page.
In some cases, the information came from e-mail conversations, published documents, Web sites, the Internet, or other massmedia sources.
In each case study, quotes are in indented paragraphs and editorial comments [like this comment] are placed in brackets. For example,
The end result of the project was totally mind blowing. It will revolutionize [in the project manager's opinion] the chicken farming business making it one of the growth industries of the 90's.
In several cases I simply paraphrased the material from acknowledged sources. In a few cases, I did some minor editing of quotes send in an informal style. In all cases, I did not change the meaning.
9 . 1 The CAJUN Project
SUMMARY
The CDROM Acrobat Journal Using Networks (CAJUN) project is an experiment in publishing journal articles using Acrobat. Dissemination of the resulting PDF files occurs via network and CD-ROM.
BACKGROUND
The CAJUN and it's follow on, the CAJUN II projects, are efforts to move the publication of electronic journals toward a genuine technical and business reality. The project is a collaboration between the Electronic Publishing Research Group at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., the publishers. Initially the Wiley journal Electronic PublishingOrigination, Dissemination and Design (EP-odd) was the focus. A second journal, Chapman and Hall's Optical and Quantum Electronics (OQE) as a non-computer science journal, was also used for the project. The bulk of this case study comes from the paper "Journal publishing with Acrobat: the CAJUN project" by Philip N. Smith, David F. Brailsford, David R. Evans, Leon Harrison, Steve G. Probets and Peter E. Sutton, in the Proceedings of Electronic Publishing 94, Darmstadt Germany. The authors are all members of the Electronic Publishing Research Group at the University of Nottingham in the UK.
The CAJUN Project home page at the University of Nottingham
The CAJUN project has expanded to a set of nine journals. These can be found at: http://www.ep.cs.nott.ac.uk/wiley/journals/. Each journal has or soon will have its own home page:
- Electronic Publishing - Origination, Dissemination and Design
- Software Practice and Experience
- Internetworking
- Software Testing Verification and Reliability
- Software Maintenance
- Visualisation and Computer and Animation
- Concurrency, Practice and Experience
- Software Process - Improvement and Practice
- Network Management
ACROBAT
Acrobat was chosen for the project because it had the potential of being a flexible, platform-independent standard, documented in the public domain, rather than yet another proprietary system. The Acrobat publishing process is also capable of using existing PostScript documents. The following figure, redrawn from the previously cited paper illustrates the Acrobat publishing process:
HYPERTEXT
Acrobat has the ability to support hypertext links. These links in the Acrobat viewer application are displayed as text; a black box is drawn around the text. This default display is ugly and clashes with surrounding text. The CAJUN team decided to add PostScript color to the linked text and effectively replace the default display. This was accomplished using the pdfmark PostScript operator, part of the PDF enhancements to PostScript. After betatesting the displays, the CAJUN team decided on the following:
Buttons for links should be displayed in dark blue rather than being enclosed in a box. The shade of blue chosen is easy to distinguish on screen yet is dark enough to print clearly on a 300-dpi monochrome printer. Users of monochrome screen displays, probably small in number, will find it hard to distinguish the coloured text, but will at least know that all textual references are linked up.
Link destinations should bring up a view of the document with the target material positioned at the top of the screen. The view should be at the current magnification, as this is the most comfortable for the reader.
PDF bookmarks should be provided for all section heading at all levels. The destination view, after following a bookmark, should be the same as for other links (i.e., beginning of section at top of page and current magnification).
One "principal aim of the project is to automate the process of generating pdfmarks from the troff or LaTeX source."
The solution we have adopted involves delving into the output routines of TeX to intercept the page just before output. ...when version 2 of pdfmark becomes available, with an optional argument for `source page number,' it will be possible to position all pdfmarks at the image of the PostScript file.
Generation of pdfmarks for bookmark entries also requires extra processing in order to arrange them into a hierarchy reflecting that of the sections in the paper. This is also done with extra PostScript procedures defined in the prologue.
CONCLUSIONS
Clearly the CAJUN project has demonstrated the feasibility of automatically generating electronic documents that retain page fidelity. The process, however is not simple. It required experienced document processing professionals. It was research, however, the lessons learned will apply to a wide range of practical publishing problems. As Acrobat becomes more widely available and integrated with the Web, the procedures the CAJUN project has invented will become even more valuable.
