Signal Processing Society
Electronic Publication Experiment




Table Of Contents

E-Pub Main Page

Submission Info

Reviewer Info

Author Info

Examples

Links

Project Documentation

Daily Work Log

Personnel

Blow by Blow

First Days: Warm-Up and Preparation


In our first days on the job, we learned a lot. Our handy UNIX and MS Windows skills came into use.

We started by loading LaTeX and GNU Emacs onto our PC.
Neither worked at first, but after some playing in MS-DOS we had GNU Emacs installed first.

In LaTeX, we would need to run a file in order to make sure things were working properly. We had a file called example.tex. This file actually documents information on different properties of LaTeX.

Our problems with LaTeX came about from missing files. At first, we were missing files for amsmath, a package in the LaTeX language that controls all the equation and math formatting done in LaTeX documents. Then, we were missing some font files. For example, LaTeX could find cmex9.mf and cmex9.tfm, but it could not find cmex8.mf or cmex8.tfm. These files represent the same fonts of different sizes. Many programs use a particular font file and scale it for other sizes, and in these programs, given cmex9.* was available, cmex8.* would not be neccessary. Our program called for the cmex8.* files, though, and so we ftp'd all the neccessary files to our PC.

We dragged example.tex into LaTeX, and *presto* there was a .dvi file on the desktop holding our example.
Two of the figures were in color, but both of these figures are .eps files, or encapsulated postscript, which can handle color.
An equation and other parts of the document that were tested in color did not come out in color.
All the hyperlinks worked and the formatting was correct.

May 28, 1999

Today we worked on understanding hyperlinks.

LaTeX has a package called hyperref that deals with hyperlinks. We have been reading through this code, but we do not fully understand it yet.
Los Alamos National Library had information on hyperlinks in LaTeX at http://xxx.lanl.gov/hypertex/

MS Word provides an easy way for users to create hyperlinks. Using Word Help, we quickly figured out how to insert links into word documents.

Today we also started thinking about how to password protect a web document using htaccess files. We searched the web and found some possibilities at:
http://paul.rutgers.edu/cgi-docs/htpasswd.html
http://www.sbrady.com/hotsource/html/password.html
http://www.apacheweek.com/features/userauth
but we tried all these things and nothing has yet worked.

June 1, 1999

We have figured out password protection. Earlier, there was a problem with the way httpd was configured on our server.

Now, we want to figure out how to automate the submission process. We want to:
1. Allow a person to submit
2. create a protected page with this person's submission
3. allow that person and all editors assigned to this submission access into the document.
We will do this with a CGI script.

The Hyperlinks still don't carry through to UNIX, nor do they carry from a Word document to .pdf on a Mac. Tomorrow we'll see if they carry through on a PC.

June 2, 1999

Today we fooled around a lot with different format converters, like word->html, html->ps, ps->pdf, etc etc. We sent a word document through to .pdf, but the "mailto" links did not continue, nor did colored links, and that was using html. We decided html will never take care of equations well, so we might as well forget it! Oh, well. It also seems postscript is a problem... converters don't carry all hyperlinks and color well into .ps files. We figured out that our dvi->ps is not the most recent version, so the gurus are going to take care of it and get us teTeX. We found out that ghostscript comes with ps2pdf. And we used it, too! Yay! We searched the CTAN ftp site and got no answers (yet).

June 8, 1999

After many days of trying, getting stuck, and spending our leftover time learning perl and UNIX, we got a file translated all the way from .tex to .pdf.

We had a .tex file hand-formatted (without ieee.cls) that we had previously translated to .dvi. We had teTeX beta 0.9 installed, and in this version there is a dvi->ps translator that works called (cleverly) dvips, and preserves hyperlinks with a -z switch. (also, this translator sends the output to the printer. To change this, use the -o filename switch. Look here for the UNIX commands that we used.) From there we used ghostscript's ps->pdf, called ps2pdf, and we came out with a .pdf file containing all color, figures, formatting and links. Yipee!!!

Unfortunately, when we tried the example .tex file that was formatted using the ieee.cls file, the TeX compiler reported errors from the color package which we could not immediately identify. We removed the color text and the translator worked, perpetuating all hyperlinks (including a mailto:) and most of the figures.

In the PC world, we can get the .pdf to call up matlab when the hyperlink is to a matlab file. It will not, however, load the matlab file (yet). We got the .pdf file to play the rockin' .wav file of Dr. Johnson saying "Alexander Graham Bell." Cool. We haven't yet gotten the file to bring up matlab in UNIX, and the .wav file just produces a horrible screeching sound, but that's what's supposed to happen, so hey.

June 14th, 1999

I am still learning perl, but I have proof of my endeavors! I have written a cgi script attached to a web page with a form. If someone submits information into the form, the perl parses it, sends the information to me and to that person, and puts up a return page on their browser thanking them for their submission.
In my next example, the perl will also write the submitted information to a log file. It will also create a directory for this file that is password protected (hopefully!). Right now I am having trouble with writing to a file in perl from the web interface. My script executes beautifully from a prompt, but when run from the html form, the file isn't even created. Here is the code I am working with:

$logfile = "/home/sunbeam/public_html/esubmit/1/log.html";
sub write_log{
open(FILE, ">$logfile") || die "I can't open $logfile\n";
print FILE "<html><head><title>Log of Entries</title></head>\n";
print FILE "<body>\n";
print FILE "<basefont size=5>\n<blockquote>\n";
print FILE "Name: $username\n<br>\n";
print FILE "E-mail: $email\n<br>";
print FILE "Comments: $comments\n<br>";
print FILE "</blockquote>\n";
print FILE "</body></html>\n";
close(FILE);
}

But for some reason this is not opening or creating the file like I want it to. See Example 1 of Perl to see the form html and perl for the return page and email version of my program-so-far!!
-Laura

In order to try to allow links to .mat files to call up Matlab with the .mat file preloaded, we added a MIME Type for Matlab to our server. We then fooled around with our browser configuration, consulted both Matlab and Netscape technical assistance resources, and experimented with various ideas. The best result we could come up with was the situation where clicking the link will start up Matlab in another window, but without the .mat file preloaded. As a result, we will have to use zip or gzip (probably both to make it most accesible) to bundle the data files with the rest of the article to facilitate easy downloading by the reader, who can then run the file through Matlab manually.
-Doug

June 16, 1999

The E-Pub page is up and organized! Even our submission page has stuff on it. We posted the how-to pages on hypertex and ieee.cls today, so that our submitters will know how to use what we are offering them. There's no good in having all this great stuff available-- color, hyperlinks, etc-- unless our authors know how to use it. ya?
We are continuing to work on the perl script, and contemplating too often the dream of someday learning javascript. Right now we are looking for the best perl way to generate passwords.
Dr. J ordered a book from Amazon called: "Web Publishing with Acrobat/PDF" by Thomas Merz. The book is very informative for anyone interested in using PDF for web publishing (the title is clever, eh?). The book takes advantage of the fact that PDF is favorable for web publishing because of the control over layout which is lacking in HTML.

June 24, 1999

Dr. Johnson presented our web page today. We are almost completely ready to go. Today we worked on cleaning up the organization of the web page. Also, we want to clean up the pdf presentation. Our pdf files aren't of very high quality because of the type 3 bitmapped fonts in postscript. We are going to use distiller to improve this. The adobe page also has a help article on this very topic, but the solution they provide would be drawn out and ugly. Hopefully distiller will work.

June 29, 1999

The main things we need to polish these days are submission and reviewal, but we aren't exactly sure how the processes will go, so our job entails a bit of foresight. Yesterday, I put a reviewal form on the web at http://spib.ece.rice.edu/E-Pub/review/review.html. I am splitting the form up and moving it today, and setting up a layered reviewal process where the editor first enters some information on the paper and then the reviewers will review the paper. I haven't written a script to handle the review document, yet. This is what I plan to do next. Right now I am also waiting for Dr. Johnson to test the submission. It seems to work just fine, so that is definitely ready for July 1. I have also been learning javascript and trying to understand what javascript could do for this project.
A note on something from June 14th: I believe the only problem with the perl I was using was that I was using the || instead of or. I think that || is a bitwise operation and should not be used with open().
-Laura

Today we aquired Adobe Acrobat 4.0 in the hopes that the use of Acrobat Distiller, which is included in this package, would enable us to provide a more attractive pdf file when viewed on-screen. Currently when converted through from dvi to pdf most of the fonts are converted to Type 3 bit-mapped fonts, which, while they print out nicely, appear screwy on-screen. Distiller has an option which allows you to embed fonts in the pdf file itself, so that they are always available on the viewer's screen, allowing for a more attractive appearance. However, currently Distiller is not allowing us to embed the fonts, claiming that they are 'Not Found,' and so I have been trying to solve this problem, which will require some more practice with Distiller at this time.
A side note is that Acrobat 4.0 has several nifty options which may make our job easier, however if we format our pdf files for Acrobat 4.0 they will not read appropriately on Acrobat Reader 3.0 or lower. If we do use Acrobat 4.0 then readers will have to download Acrobat Reader 4.0 in order to accurately view the files.
-Doug

November 23, 1999

Ok so we've been slacking on the "daily" journal. Sue me.
We have received a couple of submissions and the reviewal process is sort-of rolling. I created an example Journal here to give an idea of what the journal could look like (sans artistic license). We are still facing the font problem; we want to be able to automate the whole process on UNIX so it looks like we are going to somehow have to create a font mapping file so that the PDF doesn't look sloppy. -laura
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