Portable Documents: Acrobat, SGML & TeX

9.30--5.00, Thursday January 19th, 1995

The Bridewell Theatre, Bride Lane (off Fleet Street), London

Preamble:

Computers, software, and electronic communication seem set to transform the world of publishing, just as they changed typesetting. Donald Knuth's freely available TeX system provides access to high quality typesetting for almost all computer users. Using the Internet, millions of words can be sent across the globe in seconds. SGML provides a recognised international standard for the encoding of structured documents. The World Wide Web and its browsers allow documents to be distributed and read without being printed. Similarly, Acrobat allows us to retain the typographic look and feel without necessarily having the `correct' fonts.

Our speakers cover important aspects of the emerging technologies, and addressed the problems of making it all work together, from the points of view of the authors, the publishers, the producers, and the readers.

Speakers:

David Barron (Southampton):

who has long been an advocate of the merits of SGML for the storage and processing of structured documents;

David Brailsford (Nottingham):

who heads an active research group in electronic publishing discussed Adobe's Acrobat, its underlying Portable Document Format, and the use of LaTeX to create linked documents;

Peter Flynn (University College, Cork):

a practitioner of both TeX and SGML, discusses the relationship of HTML, World Wide Web and (La)TeX;

Geeti Granger (John Wiley):

who heads the electronic publishing team at this publisher, long known for their involvement in various forms of electronic publishing, and who have recently published EP-odd in Acrobat form on CD-Rom;

Martin Key (Elsevier Science);

Elsevier is a publisher with a deep and extensive commitment to SGML; their pragmatic use of LaTeX is rather less well known;

Jonathan Fine:

demonstrates software to allow TeX to typeset directly from SGML (and HTML).

Michael Popham (OUCS);

exploding the popular myth that there are no tools for handling SGL docuiments by examining some of the applications available for handling the creation, validation and editing of SGML documents.