FXDDR@ALASKA.BITNET.UUCP (05/21/87)
Date: Wed, 20 May 87 19:55 ADT From: <FXDDR%ALASKA.BITNET@Forsythe.Stanford.EDU> Subject: Scientific Publishing Partner To: info-atari16@score.stanford.edu X-Original-To: "info-atari16@score.stanford.edu", FXDDR One of my advisors here was sufficiently enthused about some of the documents I turned out with Publishing Partner and the Apple LaserWriter that he bought a couple of STs and Publishing Partner. That means I have to pull together the notes on using Publishing Partner (PP) with PostScript (PS) for him to use, so I thought I might as well post a summary in case other people are trying to do technical writing this way. My first major project, a photo-ready paper for Geophysical Research Letters, should be out the door Real Soon Now. 1) SoftLogik says a new PS driver and a HP LaserJet II driver is now available. I've sent for them but don't know how they'll affect the following. 2) Adjust Times-Roman screen font. This is the one most journals want. The PP version has some discrepancies with the PS version, the worst being that its numerals are various widths while PS numerals are all the same width. This makes columns of numbers look funny. I now use my revised version which I call Times2. 3) If you use the screen font editor posted on CIS, you'll find the first 32 codes of Helvetica have different symbols than the first 32 of Times- Roman. Helvetica is correct, Times-Roman is garbage (this is also fixed in Times2). These characters are accessible as follows: ESCAPE SPACE generates screen code 127 decimal and sends 127 to PS. ESC ! thru ESC ? generate screen codes 1-31 decimal and send 161-191 to PS. This includes various useful characters, such as left and right double quotes, endash, etc. Makes PP output look a lot more like TeX! 4) I defined a font called Symbol2 which maps into the PS Symbol font. Virtually all of the Symbol characters are accessible, and with a little care can be formed into fairly complex equations on screen. 5) The old PS driver keys off the font code: codes < 5000 -> Helvetica, codes >= 5000 -> Times-Roman. I modified the driver so that it calls for "Rices-Roman" and "Symbol2" instead of Times-Roman and Helvetica in the PP PS output. These fonts are simple variants defined in a short header that I prepend to the PP PS file. The results, when handled carefully, are virtually indistinguishable from TeX (in fact, some TeX hax have asked if they can use my macros...). For highly mathematical papers, PP probably won't save you much or any time over TeX, since fiddling on screen takes almost as long as setting up the TeX directives. However for papers with moderate amounts of math, I find PP is considerably faster to use than TeX...and it works quite nicely with a single SSDD drive. Anybody interested in the fonts is welcome to them. Once I see what the new PS driver is like, I will try to bundle up a "new and improved" package and post it somewhere. Don Rice FXDDR@ALASKA.BITNET