About the Electronic Processing

Adobe PDF format

Adobe PDF is an industry standard which has been adopted by JACoW for the publicaiton of conference papers. It is important that the PDF files conform to certain standards, which is why conferences issue specific instructions on how to produce the files which are to be converted for publication at JACoW. JACoW is an open archive and the files published on it are tailored to meet specific standards which will ensure the long term future of the archive. JACoW conferences request PostScript files so that they have control over all of the parameters of the PDF file (compression, font embedding, PDF/A conformity etc.). Each PDF file contains hidden fields defining a set of information containing a title, the author name, subject and keywords which are set during processing by the conference editors. At the same time, page numbering, conference title and other information like copyright details are added to each page. Some authors have had difficulty in producing PostScript files and in principle it is possible for author-produced PDF files to be used if they are prepared correctly. Specific instructions have been prepared so that authors can prepare and submit PDF files and these are contained in a separate document. The PDF files are published on the JACoW site with HTML indices and other conference information. The JACoW custom search engine interface allows boolean searches on keywords, title, authors and in the full text.

Performance

The JACoW collaboration considers the performance of the website to be very important for users considering the wide range of users around the world and the range of resources avilable to them. A key factor in the speed with which a page is displayed is the size/complexity of the file and a page should usually be displayed very quickly. Typically, each page should display in 5/N seconds, where N is the processor speed in GHz. Graphics and illustrations can be painfully slow if the files are too big or complex.

Why is paper size an issue ?

The text/images are placed on a PDF page of a pre-determined size. For Europe this normally to corresponds to A4 size paper but if a colleague in the USA wants to print on their own standard (US letter) size paper we want the result would normally be different and some text might even be lost. The height of the text is defined for all JACoW contributions (241mm) which will fit within the margins of both paper sizes. If this was centred on the page, there would be different bottom margins for the two sizes of paper. A solution to this problem was suggested by Leif Liljeby (MSI, Sweden) which involves cropping the PDF file to the minimum dimensions of A4 and US Letter paper (i.e. A4 width and US letter height, 210 by 279mm). By doing this in the source file, most printer drivers will automatically set the text area in the centre of the paper. Unfortunately this means that templates for both paper sizes are necessary. The specification for the page layout of JACoW papers allows centring of the text on JACoW paper size whilst still allowing sufficient margins for page numbers, conference banners, copyright information and other labels to be added.

Preferred Software for Paper Preparation

WORD, OpenOffice and LaTeX are preferred by the editorial teams. It is acceptable for authors to use other software to prepare their papers but they will then have to be careful to follow the layout instructions and conventions and be sure that their postscript files will be acceptable. Using non preferred software also makes it very difficult for the editorial team to help fix problems.