Typesetting

Citation

Sienz, J. (1999), "Typesetting", Engineering Computations, Vol. 16 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ec.1999.18216dab.001

Typesetting

Typesetting

Keywords Internet, Publishing, Research, Typesetting

This is, sadly, the last Internews from Dr Sienz. MCB would like to thank him for his excellent contributions over the past 18 months.

Welcome to Internews of Engineering Computations Academic research does not work without publication of the results. Therefore, this edition of Internews looks at the Internet to find out about typesetting facilities. Emphasis is put on usability and on price. For this purpose, Internews visits three sites offering typesetting facilities.

The rapidly changing world of the Internet poses a problem for Internet Web site designers since Web pages rely on layout and special effects for maximum effectiveness with visitors. However, the technology to ''define'' the Web pages (html, dhtml, xml, vxml, etc.) and the browser technology progress at a fast pace, making it difficult for designers to keep up-to-date. Webwatch visits two Internet sites giving some support to Web page designer.

Site #1: Star Division Online

Star Division Online http://www.stardivision.com/solaris/index.html has produced an integrated suite of applications consisting of the typical set of modules, such as word-processor, spreadsheet and presentation tool. So far this does not sound too existing, but what is definitely of interest to people is their licensing scheme. Their product StarOffice 5.0, Personal Edition, is available free of charge for individual non-commercial use.

StarDivision's home page has been professionally designed with the typical navigation buttons on the left and the top. The main area of the page is for displaying the information. When following the link Star Office 5.0 Personal Edition for free the visitor is taken to a page where it is possible to choose the correct operating system for which Star Office is available: Windows, OS/2, Macintosh, Linux, Solaris, Java and Server. Here, I followed the links Solaris, StarOffice 5.0 Personal Edition Download and I Accept (after reading and accepting the licence conditions) to reach the registration page for StarOffice. After completion of the registration page the visitor can download StarOffice. For Solaris the file size is around 67MB whereas it is 53MB for Windows. Within a few minutes the visitor is e-mailed a registration key which is necessary to install StarOffice, which is fairly straightforward.

The strengths of StarOffice are that it is a modern WYSIWYG typesetting system with a modern interface, it has a better integration than MS Office (do-everything-in-one-place philosophy) and it seems to be able to read most of the Office 97 documents; at least the ones I have been using. A weakness, which is important for the scientific community, is the typesetting of equations.

To summarise, this is a typical ''MS Office'' Windows style integrated environment with some weaknesses and some strengths. It copes with most of the things one has to do in everyday work at the office and at this ''price'' it is hard to beat.

Site #2: Welcome to Linux.Corel.Com

After having found a complete office suite for free on the Internet I was quite surprised to find that Corel is offering their WordPerfect word processor also for free on http://linux.corel.com. This offer has two major limitations over StarDivision's: it offers only a word processor and not an office suite; and it is limited to the Linux operating system. Apart from this, the user can download what seems to be a fully functional version of WordPerfect. A close look reveals that the downloadable version, as opposed to the CD-version for $70, has neither the equation editor nor the graphic editor. Naturally, this severely restricts the usefulness of this offer of WordPerfect.

The download and installation work without any major problems. The user has to register within 90 days of installation in order to use WordPerfect beyond the initial 90-day limit. The registration gathers not only details about the user but also carries out a survey about the user. Most probably, Corel will use this information later to develop a marketing and/or support strategy for which they most probably intend to charge.

Corel's Linux Web page is well designed and leaves a fresh impression. However, there seems to be some incompatibility with the html forms they have used for the registration and Netscape Communicator 4.02 for Solaris 2.5.1. After leaving the registration page, the form input fields are not deleted and spoil the other pages. The visitor has to open a new Navigator window to overcome this.

For people who are used to WordPerfect and want to use the familiar environment of this word processor under Linux this is a good option.

Site #3: LyX -- The Document Processor

The first two Web sites pointed to ''MS Office and Windows style'' type WYSIWYG systems. For scientific purposes their major disadvantage is the lack of high quality typesetting of mathematical expressions. This is where the strength of TeX/LaTeX lies.

LyX tries to combine the power of TeX/LaTeX with the WYSIWYG advantage of the first two approaches. LyX's home page is at http://la1ad.uio.no/lyx. In their own words: ''LyX is a free program that provides a more modern approach of writing documents with a computer. Compared to common word processors, LyX increases productivity, since the job of typesetting is done mostly by the computer, not the author. Technically this is done by combining the comfortable interface of a WYSIWYG word processor with the high quality output of LaTeX <$>\ldots<$> No knowledge of LaTeX is required to use LyX''. LyX uses XFormQ as the underlying GUI toolkit.

For LyX to work, it is necessary to have a complete TeX/LaTeX installation such as teTeX or NteX, a previewer such as xdvi and a postscript interpreter such as ghostscript. In other words, LyX works on top of a normal, complete TeX/LaTeX installation. LyX is aimed at Unix users and here mainly at Linux users. Since the source code is available, it might be possible to compile LyX for a specific system.

LyX's Web site is colourful with a navigation bar on the left and the main display window on the right. The navigation bar leads the visitor to Main Page, More about LyX, Screenshots, License (LyX is distributed under the GNU General Public License), Features, How to get it, Feedback, Mailing Lists and Developers Only. The Screenshots give an indication of the interface and its user friendliness.

LyX seems a robust front-end capable of harnessing the power of TeX/LaTeX. This enables beginners to produce scientific papers which are typeset in high quality. However, TeX/LaTeX purists might prefer to work with vi or xemacs?

A product similar to LyX is KLyX, which can be found at http://www.devel.lyx.org/~ettrich/klyx.html. KLyX uses QT for the user interface, which comes with the KDE Desktop Environment http://www.kde.org.

Webwatch

When visiting Web sites with various browsers, the layout of the displayed Web pages can differ quite considerably and sometimes certain features assumed to be available in the visitor's browser are simply not supported. This might even happen when using a browser from one vendor but running it under a different operating system. Naturally, this makes the work for Web page designers quite difficult since they rely among other things -- as anybody else doing ''typesetting'' -- on a well planned layout for achieving maximum impact with the reader. Another aspect of designing Web pages is the rapid change of the languages used for the Internet -- html, dhtml, xml, vxml, java, javascript, etc. It is difficult to keep track of all these new developments and to ensure that your own Web page complies with the standards. At the same time, you should use the best available technology to deliver the content. The Web site BrowserWatch Home Page at http://browserwatch.internet.com is a Web site containing up-to-date news on the latest developments on the browser technology front. The BrowserCaps site at http://www.browsercaps.com/cv/index.html is a resource to test the ''HTML-handling capabilities'' of browsers.

The Internet Editor of Engineering ComputationsHome Page: http://www.swan.ac.uk/civeng/General/staff/js.html.The Internet Editor of Engineering Computations, Johann Sienz, can be contacted via e-mail: J.Sienz@swansea.ac.uk or fax +44-1792-295676.