ken@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (Ken Birman) (01/18/90)
Several people have suggested that we make technical papers available via FTP as an alternative to shipping hard copies. This seems like a reasonable way to get our costs down, but raises problems due to figures -- I won't provide access to papers with the figures missing, and many of our papers have glued-in figures. Pat Stephenson suggested the following procedure, which we are testing now. If it works, and you have the capacity to print dvi files, you should be able to print our full papers or read them using a previewer. I'm posting this because I would be interested in hearing of any "better" schemes people might know of. The approach has to work with latex and result in completely self-contained documents with figures included right in them. (Fig has the disadvantage that it doesn't have a graphical editor interface.) >From patrick@cs.cornell.edu Wed Jan 17 10:51:00 1990 >Subject: how to do self-contained figures for latex. >Reply-To: pat@cs.cornell.edu > I've spent some time discussing this issue with Micah. Here's what we > think is best: > 1) Prepare figures with fig. When typing text into figures, arbitrary > tex notation can be used (it won't look good on the screen, however) > 2) Use transfig (see below) to translate these figures to the latex > epic macros. > 3) ship the epic.sty file with the document (~25k). > This will provide portability. The epic macros do a pretty good job, > but not perfect (lines with certain slopes look jagged, etc). Files > prepared with epic can be previewed. > For camera ready copy, we can work with the same fig and tex source, > but translate the fig files to eepic. eepic gives nicer output, but > requires a dvi to ps translator that not everbody has. (And we don't > want to ship it!) Files prepared with eepic can not be previewed. > Obviously, anyone who gets our latex source and has eepic can do this > for themselves. > Now, using transfig: > 1) put \include{transfig} at start of document > 2) put \include{fign} in the appropriate place. > 3) prepare the fig files, and just say "transfig -L epic *.fig" > 4) say "make" > Repeat the "make" when a .fig file changes. To add a new figure, or > to change the target macro language, repeat both "transfig" and "make". > I'm doing the figures for a paper now, using this method. It seems > practical.