Washington Technologies White Papers

SGML and the Astrophysical Journal

The Astrophysical Journal (ApJ) is a large and complex scientific journal of more than 25,000 pages per year published by the University of Chicago Press under the sponsorship of the American Astronomical Society.

The American Astronomical Society (AAS) has been active in promoting electronic communications. They developed a LaTeX macro set called AASTeX to be used by authors in preparing manuscripts for various astronomy journals including the ApJ. Our initial challenge was to accept AASTeX electronic art and use that input to drive our editing and conventional typesetting processes. The first solution proposed was to abandon typesetting and copy editing and produce the journal using author-supplied TeX (in effect, from camera copy). That was rejected for several reasons, including a concern that TeX was not a forward-looking solution to what would eventually become an entirely electronic communication process between authors and readers. Instead, we chose SGML. At the time (1992), that was a fairly radical decision -- at least in scholarly publishing circles and given the content of the journal. As it turned out, however, it was exactly the right thing to do. When the World Wide Web came along and the Astronomical Society asked us to produce an online journal, we were ready: our SGML implementation was well underway and adding another output format was a trivial matter.

The Problem and The Solution

The Astrophysical Journal is Byzantine in its size and complexity: editorial offices in Tucson and Cambridge, production in Chicago, typesetting at two different typesetters in the U.S. and the U.K. using two different typesetting systems, issues coming out every ten days, and a style and structure that hadn't changed in many decades. And the content isn't easy either: extensive display mathematics, special symbols unique to astronomy, many other special symbols including some chemistry, enormous tables (some more than 100 pages long), and tens of thousands of illustrations including color and halftone plates. Introducing modern electronic technology such as SGML to this publication was rather like trying to redecorate a jumbo jet between flights, one row at a time. And that was how we did it: by building and installing the pieces incrementally.

We started with the text: first we built LaTeX to SGML to typesetting system for paper publication with electronic editing in SGML; then we built paper editing to typesetting system to SGML to HTML for online publication; and finally we put both halves together as paper or SGML to and from typesetting. (Our assumption was that the proof stage would continue to be handled on the typesetting systems.) For the illustrations, we waited until the text problems were well in hand and then built scripts and tools for processing and manipulating both author-supplied art and typesetter-scanned art for the print edition and the online edition. At the moment, the electronic edition is still a step-child of the paper edition; it uses pieces that are produced as by-products of the print production. In 1997, however, that will change as the electronic and paper editions become equal outputs of the SGML-based editorial process.

Conclusion

We began our SGML implementation in search of a vendor-neutral technology that would allow us to accept author electronic manuscripts in a variety of formats and produce a paper product. We found a technology that allowed us to do that and a whole lot more. It turned out that for the Astrophysical Journal and the University of Chicago Press, the long-term benefits of SGML were not in the print production process at all, although we were able to reduce our conventional typesetting costs considerably, but rather in new things that were and will be made possible by SGML:

1. When the sponsor of the journal decided that it was time for an online edition, we were ready and able to produce it from the SGML.
2. As we move to publishing information that cannot be captured in print on paper, SGML will provide a robust framework for managing that information. We are confident in that projection based on experience with producing a paper and electronic edition from a common SGML text.

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