OH NO! .... not another book about the Web!!!

That's exactly right, this is not just another book.

I wrote this book because the explosion of activity surrounding the Internet and World Wide Web has fundamentally changed the world of electronic publishing.

This book is a complete birdseye view of the World Wide Web, Internet, and the technologies involved in creating electronic publications from them. This book provides you with background information and practical guidance on how to surf, view, and publish material for the Web, as well as on paper. The explosion of activity surrounding the Internet and the World Wide Web requires a sane, non-hyped guide to help you navigate the sometimes treacherous waters.

Whether you are preparing a short report, a lengthy book, or Web site, electronic publishing is an interdisciplinary field. It requires many different skills. This book covers each of these fields in enough depth to give you the knowledge to find the details yourself.

The technologies surrounding the Internet and the World Wide Web are changing so rapidly that no book can be completely up-to-date for long. However, I'll explain how those technologies form a collection of integrated communications tools. Using this information and these tools, you can explore and express your ideas and follow new developments in the field.

Design, communications, data processing, and systems integration are some of the skills you must master to play the electronic document game. Even writing text using an electronic publishing system is different from simply typing the old-fashioned way. In fact, you must become a "document engineer." Your text will be processed by a complex document processing program. The electronic files will be assembled into a report. The electronic processing system will also compute page numbers. It will create the table of contents. It will generate and create lists of figures and tables. If you use the electronic system properly, you will accomplish all these tasks quickly and easily.

You can approach document creation in many ways. Only you can know which is appropriate for your needs. This book explains the basic approaches and gives you the background you need to decide for yourself how to proceed. Once you choose an approach, you can create the document so that its content can outlive the system on which it was created. Being able to reuse part or all of your material will save you time and money. Document standards will help you accomplish this goal. After all, it is the content of your publication that matters.

In this book we begin with a tour of the World Wide Web. Chapters 1 and 2 will give you the key terms and concepts, some practical suggestions on using the Web, and an overview of some promising developments and likely trends.

Next, we will explain the fundamental concepts involved in electronic documents and present some of the many ways in which you can work with and view them. Then, we will discuss document standards, management, and how standards affect the publishing process. Finally, we will learn from others. A series of case studies will demonstrate how to approach the realworld problems of document production. The book concludes with lists of helpful resources.

Throughout the book, you will find discussions of specific tools, software products, and other technologies, as well as many examples. The goal is to clarify the complexities of this exciting and valuable field to help you decide for yourself how best to meet your own document processing needs. And to help you communicate with the professional.

In many ways, this book is a second edition of my previous book, Perspectives on Electronic Publishing, published in 1993 by Prentice-Hall. However I never did like that name. We needed a new one.

More importantly since that time the whole field of Electronic Publishing has gone through a radical change. The biggest development has been the creation and wide acceptance of the World Wide Web. In the early 90's electronic publishing was an ambiguous and obscure term. Now everyone rightly assumes that it is concerned mainly with the Web. Thus I have expanded and extended the content, focussing on the Web as the premier electronic publishing medium.

Finally I would like to point out the existence of the:

Yuri Rubinsky Insight FoundationCIBC (Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce)Att: Anne Foster, Private Banking Centre2 Bloor Street WestToronto Ontario Canada M4W 2G7

This foundation will commemorate Yuri's life by:

"...bringing together workers from a broad spectrum of disciplines to stimulate research and development of technologies which will enhance human access to information of all kinds. Recognizing that all human capabilities are limited in various ways, it seeks to achieve, to the fullest extent possible, equality of access for all."

Even though one name is listed as author inevitably many people contribute to the creation of books. This one is no exception.

This book had a strange genesis. I'd been thinking about updating Perspectives on Electronic Publishing, but never got around to doing anything. Out of the blue I got a call from a David Silverman of Innodata Corp. (whom I'd never met), who complimented me profusely and suggested that we work jointly on a related book. His ideas stimulated me, and I readily agreed. Unfortunately, David's work situation did not allow time for the project. However, I got off my rear end and started this one.

Much of my previous book forms the basis for this one. I'd like to thank many current and former colleagues at National Institute of Standards and Technology for their input: Steve Clark (FrameMaker tips), Belinda Collins and Jack Hsia (teaching me about color models), Steve Ray (electronic journal information), Pete Brown (concurrent engineering ref), Ken Manheimer (for his USENIX paper and FaceSaver), and Roy Morgan (tank photo). Kent Reed, Larry Welsch, and Yuri Rubinsky (SoftQuad) all read several chapters of the Perspectives draft and gave many useful comments.

Scott Bodarky provided some great quotes, Web tips and lots of good lunch company. Michele Vening put some order back into old FrameMaker files that had disintegrated into chaos. Thanks to Cherry Wunderlich (again), an amazingly thorough copy editor who helped me turn this into English.

Many thanks to Greg Doench of Prentice Hall for giving this a try one more time.

Finally, thanks of course, to my family Faye Taxman, Elizabeth and Joseph for living with me through "aren'tyoudonewiththatbookyet?"