by

Eric van Herwijnen, 12 may 1997

  1. Introduction

It is the intent to submit the Technical Proposal for the LHCb experiment to the LHC meeting in March 1998. To reach this date, a first complete draft should be available by November 1st, 1997. This means that we should reach a consensus on the editorial process as soon as possible, so that people can start working on their contributions now.

I assume that there will be a person responsible for the technical editing of the Technical Proposal. I will refer to this person in this document as the Editor. The tasks of the editor will be:

  • To consult the experiment on the most appropriate editorial process (this document).
  • To consult with the editorial board on the time scale for editing the document and its drafts.
  • To enforce the time scale for submission with the contributing authors.
  • To consult the authors on any technical matters concerning their contributions.
  • To consult with the editorial committee for any matter related to the content of the document.
  • To be responsible for the timely production of camera ready copies of the document and to form a liaison with the printshop.
  • To be responsible for the conversion of the document to HTML and to publish it on the LHCb Web site.
  1. The editorial process

The Technical Proposal will be a document with contributions by multiple authors. The authors will use a text processing system to create their contribution. This system may or may not be the same as the system that will finally be used to produce the complete document. The author’s contributions will be sent to the editor via email or ftp.

We need to agree on:

  • The text processing system that the authors will use to prepare their contributions.
  • The format of any images that will accompany the contributions.
  • The text processing system that the editor will use to create the final document.
  1. The authoring system

Although it would be desirable to have authors use the same system that the editor will use to create the final document, I know from experience that imposing a text processing standard on a varied author community is an impossible task. To not exclude anyone from making a contribution, and to enable authors to concentrate as much as possible on their content rather than having to learn a new tool, we should recommend the use of the most common systems.

We should therefore accept contributions in one of the following two formats (in order of my personal preference):

  • MS Word. Use only the inbuilt styles (Heading1, Heading2, Heading3 etc.). This is the easiest system to use and permits very easy conversion to HTML.
  • LaTeX, using the standard article style. We need to accept articles in LaTeX as this is still the most commonly used in the physics community. It is free and is good at displaying math text.

FrameMaker is not universally available and its use should be discouraged.

  1. The images

Images can be accepted in almost any format, preferably gif, jpg or postscript.

  1. The editor’s system

The most convenient system to create the Technical Proposal is Word. The reasons are that the Technical Proposal will have many figures and tables, and the integration of figures tables in Word is far superior to that of any word processor on the market. This does, however, mean that contributions in LaTex and FrameMaker will have to be converted. On the other hand, some conversion will always take place no matter what system we choose, and converting into Word will be an order of magnitude simpler than converting into TeX or FrameMaker. It is true that Word has some deficiencies, but these are well known and we will have to take care to avoid them.

I propose to engage some skilled temporary labour to help with the conversion, the creation of the Web version and the production of the final document in Word, for a total of 6 months full time .