Washington Technologies White Papers
Evan Owens, Electronic Publishing Manager, Journals Division,
The University of Chicago Press
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:
- 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.
- 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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