\centerline{\bf Publishing at the OU}
\smallskip
\noindent
This first one-day meeting that the BCS
Electronic Publishing Specialist Group had held outside 
London, at least within `living memory', was held at The
Open University on September  28th and organized by Paul
Bacsich.
    
Most of the speakers were from the Open University, Peter Hammersley from
Middlesex Polytechnic being the only `outsider' as the other external
speaker had to withdraw shortly before the meeting. Nonetheless it was a
very interesting day, made even more interesting by the related
demonstrations which ran through the breaks in the day. While
demonstrations by manufacturers are welcome and helpful, those by people
using equipment to carry out real tasks are often more revealing.
    
After the formal welcomes, the first speaker was John Feltham who gave the
rationale for investing in high-end EP, in particular the 
`CAPS' system used by the OU, which runs under \unix\  on
SUN workstations. Advantages include the multi-user
facility, the greater speed of operation and the greater
power of the software. PC- and Mac-based systems do not
provide the formatting facilities which CAPS provides and
although output from Microsoft Word direct to the
typesetter is a possibility, the macro and style-sheet
facilities of CAPS provide a way of imposing uniform
procedures and styles where required with an output quality
of professional standards.
    
Chris Rowley and  Bob Coates talked about the other approach at the OU,
that of using  \TeX{}, to produce mathematical and technical 
documents. The advantages include the facility for the users to see what
the final typeset output will look like at every stage, as well as all
the other advantages of  \TeX{}, which are probably familiar to
readers of \TeXline. The OU have five keyboarders who spend
at least some of their time on   \TeX{}    and 6000 pages a
year are output, almost entirely at 300\,dpi. 
\LaTeX{}    is used for input.
    
Paul Bacsich and Robin Kydd described the use of Microsoft Word Rich Text Format
(RTF) as a generic coding language. The use of style sheets defined using
RTF avoids the use of direct formatting by keyboarders (which can produce
disastrous results when translated to the CAPS system). The disadvantage of
RTF is that it is essentially linear and has no depth. When translated for
the CAPS system, the paragraph styles are only taken as name and number
(that is, the actual MS style sheet is ignored), while at
the character level the actual coding is translated, for
example, italic and bold and sorts characters. Robin Kydd
described the problems involved in the translation process,
particularly those involving tables, lists and symbols, and
finished by suggesting that more generality was needed and
this tended in the direction of \sgml.
    
Peter Hammersley's talk followed on very appositely as he discussed some of
the problems involved in translating from MS-Word into Ventura. The project
was the very practical one of producing a book of conference papers. The
papers were in the main submitted electronically and then tagged.
\hbox{Peter} described both 1988 when tags were added using
the Ventura editor which was very tedious and difficult, and
1989 when the tags were put in using MS-Word, which was
easier. However, translation into Ventura produced some
strange effects, which Peter accepted could be explained
and even by-passed, but his point was that the naive user
of such packages would find these effects a
serious problem.
    
Finally Paul Lefrere discussed table design. He pointed out that within
standard packages such as Ventura, MS-Word and even CAPS tables can be very
hard to produce to the specification required. He analysed what could be
done with the various packages (and with a specialized package
`TableTools') and how long these operations can take, that
is, how cost effective the different packages can be. The
high-end packages, not surprisingly, come out better than
the standard DTP packages, but TableTools was definitely
the winner in terms of value for money, being relatively
cheap.
    
The meeting was well attended and discussions indicated that those
attending found it of interest. That it was actually on site made it that
much more so. 

\rightline{\sl David Penfold}
