Subject: Re: NOST FITS User's Guide new version 3.0

From: Lucio Chiappetti <lucio at ifctr.mi.cnr.it>
Date: Thu, 04 Mar 93 11:09:05 ITA

On Thu, 7 Jan 1993 14:07:00 GMT you said:
>Version 3.0 of the NOST FITS User's Guide is now available.  It

 ...omissis...

>Version 3.0 is currently available in printed form only.  Steps are
>under way toward producing an electronic version.  The initial process
>will be to try to capture the PostScript file, but the goal is to
>eventually have the Guide available in the same three forms as the
>Standard: LaTeX, PostScript and flat ASCII.  Suggestions on how to
>expedite this process are welcome.  The native format is Microsoft
>Word on Macintosh.
>

  I kept the above mail in evidence awaiting to receive my paper copy,
  and while disposing of it now that I received it, I thought worth
  to reply to the above request for suggestions.

  One further possibility to be considered ALONG with the other forms
  proposed above is to store the Mac MS-Word file in "Macbinary" form
  on some Unix or VMS host. This will allow all people with a Mac
  connected to the network to retrieve the document directly.
  Most network software for Macintosh allows storage of files in Macbinary
  form (I have TSSNet DECNET, LAN Workplace TCP-IP and Brown University
  tn3270 TCP-IP running on my Mac and all allow it). This format is widely
  used by anonymous ftp servers which store Macintosh stuff.

  Another possibility, which could make happy users of MS-Word on both
  Mac's and MS-DOS PCs, is to store the file in RTF format. From MS-Word
  choose Save as... from the File menu, click on the button to choose
  the format, and select "Interchange format (RTF)", possibly the bottommost
  choice in the pop-up.
  This file format is suitable for ASCII transfer over the network.
  It can then be ingested by MS-Word on Mac and IBM PC's as well as by
  several others word processing programs. I used this succesfully to
  exchange documents with MS-Word and WordPerfect at other sites.

  The above solutions may be regarded as complementary only to the
  "standard" possibilities : Postscript, TeX and ASCII.

  Among the "standard" cases I would favour the Postscript solution,
  perhaps storing the file in Unix compress form (also).
  Producing a Postscript file from the MS-Word Print command is immediate
  with the System 7 LaserWriter driver (which can be installed also under
  System 6 as I did).
  The following points are worth noting, based on my experience of exchanging
  such files with other sites.
  The Mac Postscript file has a long prologue for the LaserWriter. I ignore
  whether the file can be printed /distributed without this bulky part, but
  it will not make any harm to leave it in.
  I experienced no problems in ftp-ing the ps file to Unix and letting
  Internet users retrieve it. Sometimes instead Decnet users had some
  problems. I believe they are related to the fact that some records in
  the ps file (I presume in the prologue) are very long, and the file is
  created by default on VMS as VARIABLE or STREAM_LF. Then Decnet COPY
  gets confused by long records. THe trick which generally works it to
  ftp the file to the VMS host in binary mode (one can even ftp itself
  onto the same host) : this way the VMS file is created as FIXED 512 and
  gives no problem.

  Concerning usage of plain ASCII files, the following is the trick I
  use to produce ASCII files with good legibility from MS-Word.
  I SELECT the entire file, than change it to a fixed spacing font like
  Courier 10 pt. The usage of fixed spacing improves the legibility
  preserving at best the justification. The choice of a size like 10 pts
  makes the lines about 72 characters long, which is OK for most printers,
  terminals, and mailing through gateways.
  Then I choose Save as... from the File menu, and click on the format
  button. In the popup I choose "Text only with divided lines" (this is
  the third entry from the top, I am unsure of the wording since my
  MS-Word version is in Italian). The purpose of this is to insert a hard
  carriage return at the end of each line (if you choose "Text only" hard
  CRs will go only at end of paragraphs, which makes the file illegible
  on most systems).
  Of course the file has to be saved with another name.
  The justification may not LOOK nice on the Mac, but IT DOES once the
  file is copied over to another computer.
  Of course any fancy font, boldface, underline, figures, headers and
  footers are lost, and tables are not handled nicely (they could be
  converted to tabbed text in advance within MS-Word)

  Concerning generation of TeX/LateX from MS-Word I cannot give any
  suggestion, but I would be very interesting in hearing what you
  can find (perhaps passing thru an intermediate RTF file ?)

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