Cactus: publishing tools.

Hyde, Hartley ; Spencer, Toby

This year, there has been a renewed interest in writing mathematics. Some teachers have explored new types of display packages. While some expensive commercial texts have reached only a mediocre standard, there has been talk of collegiate writing of electronic texts for the national curriculum. In the next few editions of CACTUS we welcome Toby Spencer to help discuss aspects of writing and publishing. Toby is responsible for our AAMT publications and is an acknowledged expert in the field of publishing mathematics. This article addresses issues relating to software choice.

Many computer software packages have been developed to help us write. We prepared these pages using Quark XPress, an industry-standard program designed to assist with the page layout of print publications. Other packages such as DreamWeaver or FrontPage facilitate the writing of webpages.

If you are preparing text for screen presentation at a meeting or lecture then use presentation software. Many Macintosh users have discovered that the an alternative to using PowerPoint for slide presentations is to use Keynote--and you can export the finished file to PowerPoint if it has to be used with Windows.

Some people mistake PowerPoint for desktop publishing software because it can hold text, images and video in movable boxes. PowerPoint is designed to create slideshows for presentations, and it is actually a very poor publishing tool for anything other than that. PowerPoint only holds boxes of individual text on each page. The text does not flow from one box to the next; nor can you create automatic tables of contents. If you want to publish something, there are more appropriate software tools.

If you review the literature for a thesis or keep a "scrapbook" of news clippings, you may find that the use of a database manager, such as FileMaker, may assist subsequent retrieval more effectively than your word-processor. Good quality email software provides an intermediate level of both editing features and search capability.

Many users develop skills using a favourite software package and persist in using it even when other packages may be more suitable. We know of a person who used Excel as his preferred word-processor because he had not bothered to learn Word.

Microsoft Office is the most common suite of applications used on any platform and therefore most people use Microsoft Word as their preferred writing tool. You may prefer to use a different word-processor, but you will almost certainly need to be able to import and export a .doc formatted file. If you are the secretary of a sports or service club it is likely that you will distribute agendas and minutes using .doc format files attached to emails. The old Word (1997-2004) .doc file format is so ubiquitous that it has become impracticable to distribute files in any other format.

Computer files are not a good way to store treasured documents unless you are prepared to keep updating your files. You can be left with thousands of unreadable files because of system and software updates. Microsoft was very patient and resisted moves to change the old, popular format but, eventually, all companies change their file formats. Even files stored as .txt can become unreadable after operating systems and hard disk structures have been updated (see break-out box on PDF).

At its heart, Word is a word-processing application; Microsoft would like to have you think that it is a comprehensive publishing tool, but we need to think of it as a word-processor with many fancy bits thrown in.

Few people are aware of the many features Word offers. Its text insertion processes can be programmed with "if" statements so that the different fields can be logically related. In this way politicians can send specific messages to targeted groups of constituents.

Word can be programmed using Visual Basic. It has some of the best spelling and grammar checking tools available. The automatically generated table of contents based on style sheets (Heading 1, etc.) is a particularly useful tool.

You may have seen cartoons suggesting that a particular forest has been reserved for OHS&W publications. As an OHS&W representative, I once needed to store an enormous number of Word files in such a way that they could be easily found. It was expected that every member of our staff could operate a computer sufficiently well to read Word files and follow hyperlinks. Each file was hyperlinked into its correct place within the hierarchy and stored on the school intranet. The structure included policy statements, meeting agendas, minutes and any relevant .pdf and PowerPoint files that could be used as teaching aids. If there was a need to amend a policy, it was easy to project the policy statement at a meeting and make the required changes immediately. When using an intranet, a direct use of Word files can be much easier than working with .html files.

Word is able to save a complex page of text as a webpage, ready to be built into an Internet site. As it does this, it automatically saves any images and equations as GIFs and JPEGs and keeps track of where they need to be placed on the webpage. It is then very easy to publish complex, formatted mathematics to the Web. However, we would not choose to use Word to edit simple webpages. For example, if we want to place the words "Hello World" on a webpage, we can write the following html code using BBLite (or any text editor):

<html>
<head></head>
<body>Hello World</body>
</html>

This forms a file of just 50 characters. For the same task, DreamWeaver generates a file of over 200 characters. If we type "Hello World" into Word and generate an html file, it contains more than 4000 characters.

Word does a lot of things automatically, but most of these functions can be turned off in the preferences. You have two choices to avoid frustration: learn to work the way Microsoft expects you to work, or switch off most of the automated features in the preferences and in Autoformat.

A few of us are dependent on continual correction from the spelling and grammar checkers. While Word does cater for regional spelling (and you can add local words to the spelling checker dictionary), its grammatical advice is very North American. There are some suggestions that become very annoying; for example, if you are continually reminded to use "that" instead of "which" or to avoid passive voice, it is possible to switch off specific aspects of the grammar checker.

Word version 4 enabled users to include algebraic expressions within the text. The construction of appropriate code for doing this was challenging. At that time several third party products became available that enabled users to insert a "capsule" of algebra which included the expression as if it were a small picture. The most popular of these was MathType. A very powerful new version can be purchased for publication packages from www.dessci.com/en/products/mathtype.

Later versions of Word were automatically installed with a cut-down version of MathType called Equation Editor. Since many users perceive no use for writing equations, the Equation Editor is sometimes an optional extra and if your copy of Word does not have the Equation Editor, then you should find your original Office CD and do a "custom installation." The IT staff at most schools are sufficiently savvy to install Equation Editor with the first installation.

Equation Editor easily handles the algebra we are likely to need, from functions and fractions to binomials and matrices. Simply go to: Insert > Object > Equation which will bring up a new window that allows you to write the expression that you need. Close the window, and the expression is inserted in the text with the correct line height. To edit your equation, just double click on it and the file will automatically open in Equation Editor.

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Equation Editor can be configured to use particular fonts or font sizes to match the text you are using in your main document; use Style > Define or Size > Define to achieve this.

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Some users find MathType and Equation Editor a bit fiddly, but they are relatively easy to use compared with many editors designed to enter and parse formulae into CAS and graphing packages.

Equations can also be copied and pasted directly into image software such as Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. They can then be saved as TIFFs, JPEGs or .eps files for use with other applications.

Although the old Word file format has become the most popular file type to attach formatted pages to email, there are a number of issues relating to portability:

* Not everybody may have the same fonts as you--even different versions of "Times" on different machines can result in spacing changes (fonts are just software, after all).

* Word "smart objects" (floating boxes of text or diagrams) often are not that smart and will hang off the page so they cannot be seen.

* Check your page set-up: Word notoriously defaults to the US letter page size, which is wider and shorter than the standard A4 we use in Australia.

* If a generic printer description is used in the page set-up, Word steadfastly refuses to print anything closer to the edge of the page than about 12 mm, often resulting in cut-off headers and footers.

* If you are having trouble sending camera images to a friend because your systems or software are not compatible, one method that often works is to embed the images in Word files. However, such illustrated Word files can change while being emailed and it is not unusual to receive files with all the colours reversed. If you see magenta trees against yellow skies use Photoshop to reverse it back. It should be noted that, in general, Word does not handle image files particularly well.

Sometimes folk prefer to use a different word-processor. For several years Sun have offered Open.Office as a free alternative to Microsoft Office. This software is usually compatible with the equivalent Microsoft product but files may be altered as they pass through some email servers.

For any given publishing task there is a narrow range of obviously preferred tools, but sometimes we get surprised. Recently I attempted a relatively simple task. I had four high resolution images. The first was used as a background. Each of the others had to have some surround removed using an alpha process so that it was rendered transparent. When each of the three pictures had been placed over the background, the resulting montage was overlayed with text boxes. Although the result looked good on a Quark XPress screen, I was unable to print or export the image--it was far too detailed and complex. When I experienced similar problems using Photoshop and Illustrator, I gave up. There were more pressing tasks.

Some months later I was building a presentation using Keynote and learned how to use the new alpha tool in that environment. I was really impressed with its ease of used and effective results. I then used Keynote to construct my montage and having added the text I was able to export the result as a high definition TIFF file. One would not normally choose presentation software to manipulate graphics. In this case, I think the match between Keynote and the operating system was an important factor.

There is a wide range of software available to help you publish mathematics. Office is a logical starting point but it does have limitations. You will probably need better tools to handle graphics, web pages and page layout.

In our next article we will discuss how to set about writing material for publication in journals, such as this one.

Adobe PDF files are perhaps the greatest development in the exchange and storage of documents in recent times. Postscript is the language of printers (you may recall sometimes getting "postscript errors" when trying to print--especially from complicated Word documents!) and is the same regardless of whether you are using Windows, Macintosh or Unix. Adobe PDF files are, in effect, "visual postscript" and can be

created from any application because you just "print" to a file--which can also "store" all used fonts. That way, you are guaranteed that somebody else sees your document the way you wanted them to.

Hartley Hyde & Toby Spencer

cactus.pages@internode.on.net