The use of text interchange standards for submitting physics articles to journals
✍ Scribed by Eric Van Herwijnen
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 1989
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 670 KB
- Volume
- 57
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0010-4655
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
In this paper we discuss which text interchange standards will enable physics authors to submit their articles directly to publishers via a computer network. An analysis of a questionnaire circulated recently by the European Physical Society shows that there is an abundance of different hardware and software in use by physics authors for electronic manuscript preparation. A standard interchange format which would permit authors to continue to use their preferred system as well as enabling document interchange seems imperative if one wishes to achieve the goal of electronic submission of machine readable documents directly to publishers.
A possible candidate could be SGML, the ISO standard for text interchange. Use of this standard would generate additional benefits such as the automatic generation of document databases. The relationships between the ISO standards SGML and ODA, the de facto standard TeX and the page description language PostScript are explained. A proposal is made for the structure of a standard physics article intended for use with SGML and TeX.
A short discussion is given on the thorny problem of the inclusion of mathematics and graphics that are particularly common in physics documents.
Finally we indicate some limitations of SGML and the prerequisites that are required to make the exchange of electronic documents in SGML format universally possible.