Sgml program

A reader can tell an extract from normal text because it's indented; a level-one subhead is more prominent than a level-two subhead; footnotes are at the bottoms of pages, "linked" via a superscript in the page; a sidebar is clearly supplementary, and pertinent to a specific passage in text because of its position on the page; figures and tables are placed as soon after they're first mentioned as possible.

Those formatting clues only seem obvious because they are a highly evolved visual language by which information has been structured for centuries.

Publishers have well-evolved typographic and page makeup styles; typesetters spend a tremendous amount of time implementing them properly; and readers know at a glance how to interpret them. In contrast to Acrobat, one of the things that makes SGML so complex is having to translate all of those conventions into the logical structure of a computer language. Anyone who has done a document analysis in preparation for writing an SGML DTD can attest to how difficult it can be to express in words the distinctions and relationships that are intuitively obvious on the page — and also to reveal those that are ambiguous, and resolve the ambiguity.

Is this indented block the same as that indented block? No, this one's an extract and that one's an abstract. How can you tell? Because the abstract comes before the text starts, and it's in a different font. And what about this extract where the lines are all different lengths? Oh, that's a poetry extract; the justified ones are prose extracts.

And by the way, the little flush-right line at the end of each one is an attribution. You get the idea. Analyzing your documents that thoroughly is in fact a very good thing to do, particularly when you're going to create book after book or journal after journal with the same structure. It actually makes everybody's work a lot easier — the designer's, the editor's, the typesetter's, and ultimately the reader's — to have all that spelled out explicitly.

But it can be a lot of work to figure it out properly in the first place. One of the most appealing aspects of Acrobat and PDF is that you don't have to go through all that. The structural information is conveyed the way it has always been — visually. Of course somebody still had to figure out that structure in the first place; but that "somebody" is usually taken for granted in most publishing workflows.

You can tell the level-two heads from the level-one heads just by looking at them. You know immediately that a particular extract is a poetry extract, and that the name of the poet is at the end of it. When you see a superscript, you look at the bottom of the page for the footnote. The first time a figure is mentioned, it is followed soon by that figure itself. All with no codes! That's an illusion, of course. Codes were needed to arrange everything on the page in just that way in the first place.

But that was done earlier, in a page-makeup program. Little or no work was needed to create the PDF from the print-page files, and no codes are apparent to a reader. That's not all.

PDF presents tables in all their typographic glory, with their carefully structured relationships and alignments intact — without any extra work at all. The same goes for special characters — Greek characters, accented characters, special typographic dingbats: No translation necessary.

If they appeared on the page, they can appear in the PDF. Best of all, equations — the bane of many electronic publishers' existence — require, literally, no work at all in Acrobat. A typeset equation is rendered on the screen just as it is on the page. All the graphics are there, too. Vector graphics — such as those created by Adobe Illustrator — are incorporated into the PDF files automatically.

Best of all, if there are small characters that are hard to read on the screen, like labels in artwork or superscripts in equations, the viewer can zoom in on them, and they become as clear as can be. Bitmapped graphics such as scanned halftones are incorporated too. Acrobat gives you the option of embedding the full high-resolution image used for the print page, or downsampling the graphics systematically discarding bits of the graphic's data while retaining the overall effect to achieve smaller file sizes and optimize electronic delivery.

PDF even allows you to differentiate between halftones and line art, retaining the crispness of the latter through higher resolution while downsampling the former more drastically, where the smaller file size still results in an acceptable image.

Acrobat brings many of those same advantages to the print world. PDF files have fewer problems when they get to the printer because the distilling process provides something of a preflighting a process printers often go through to smoke out problems in PostScript files , revealing potential snags such as missing fonts or graphics.

PDF is also much more compact, often between a quarter and a tenth the size of the corresponding PostScript file depending on the graphic complexity of the pages. And most importantly, PDF is page independent, enabling a much simpler correction process and, best of all, parallel processing: Adobe's Extreme technology splits a PDF file into multiple streams and processes them through multiple RIPs at the same time.

That dramatically reduces processing throughput time. For all those reasons, publishers are finding that PDF is the most valuable format in which to preserve their typeset print pages for output on laser printers, imagesetters, platesetters, or even digital presses like the DocuTech.

Particularly when those pages might be printed on a web press for the first edition, reprinted on a sheetfed press, kept in print in small quantities on a DocuTech, and delivered on demand via the Web with many occasions to proof on laser printers during the lifetime of the publication , the PDF archive is a valuable asset, streamlining the flow and reducing costs as the pages move from technology to technology. The most obvious reason is that print pages are rarely formatted to work well on the screen.

They tend to be vertical; the type tends to be small to conserve pages; and their structural elements and the way the reader's attention is intended to flow are communicated with visual cues that often require seeing a page as a whole which may not be possible or convenient on a screen. It's possible to reformat pages to optimize them for the screen, of course, but that is rarely done because it requires going back to the page-layout application and redoing the pages, thus canceling out a lot of the convenience.

More important is the fact that PDF carries little structural information. Acrobat does offer some navigational features: Thumbnail views are created automatically, bookmarks are created easily, the full text can be "indexed" with Acrobat's Catalog software, enabling Boolean searching of collections of PDF files like papers in a journal or chapters in a book.

You can even add hyperlinks within and between Acrobat documents, but they are usually done by hand, which gets expensive if there are many of them. And PDF files do offer a limited amount of metadata, incorporating key words, revision dates, author names, etc. Although you can see that the indented block of text at the beginning of a journal paper is obviously an abstract, there is nothing in the PDF code labeling it so.

PDF knows that abstract is in Times Bold, and is indented a pica on the left and right, but it has no idea what its meaning is. So it's impossible to write a mechanism that will display or search just the abstracts without a lot of extra hand coding. If you're only searching a few chapters in a book or the papers in a given issue of a journal, that is not a big obstacle; but if you want to search through a whole collection of books or the past five years of ten different journals, it's a huge obstacle.

It is owned and continues to be developed by Adobe Systems, Inc. To create PDF from PostScript, you need to buy the Acrobat Distiller, either as a stand-alone program or as part of another application. To create bookmarks and put in hyperlinks, you need Acrobat Exchange. All of them are reasonably priced and easy to learn to use, but they are nevertheless proprietary.

Journal publishers who may be in the process of moving to full-text SGML delivery often find PDF to be the most convenient way to supply full-text pages to their subscribers electronically, but those pages are almost always accompanied by SGML-based headers that let users navigate to the particular papers they want to retrieve.

Not if you understand how they work and what they're good for. If you publish groups of products books or journals that share a clear, repetitive structure, you will almost surely find SGML to be beneficial. Although setting it up requires some effort and expense, a well-constructed SGML-based workflow can be the most economical one over time.

It can reduce the cost of composition by providing fully tagged, error-free files for the typesetter. When publishers need to publish in more than one medium — typically print, CD-ROM, and Web — SGML almost always dramatically reduces the cost of producing subsequent versions, whether they are simply converted or modified and augmented to take advantage of the power of the various media. If you need to produce typeset pages, you will almost surely find PDF to be beneficial.

It will be the best file to furnish to the printer of your books and journals; it's a convenient way to deliver proofs electronically; it's the best way to deliver those typeset pages over the Internet for users to view or print out locally; and it's even a surprisingly effective and economical way to produce a simple CD-ROM.

It requires so little extra work and cost if you're already typesetting pages for print products that it's almost a no-brainer. A great many publishers are in both categories. We're lucky to be working in a time when such clear standards have emerged. When it was a choice between highly customized, proprietary systems, it was a mess. Now, it's clear that PDF is the best way to preserve an electronic description of the visual appearance of a page, and SGML or XML is the best way to describe the structure and meaning of its content.

Most book and journal publishers need both. As the developer of the Acrobat technology, Adobe www. Electronic Publishing from Print Books and Journals [formwrly www. Bill Kasdorf is president and owner of Impressions Book and Journal Services, a composition- and publishing-services firm that designs, edits, and produces books and journals in print and electronic forms.

Serving a wide range of publishers — trade, professional, scholarly, college, technical, medical, and legal — Impressions has developed a national reputation for the effective and practical application of technology to the production of both books and journals.

From , he was vice president of Edwards Brothers, a book and journal manufacturer. He sold Impressions to EB in and bought it back in Bill is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year. A member of the Board of Directors of the Society for Scholarly Publishing, he is a frequent and effective speaker and seminar leader for SSP, as well as for other publishing-industry organizations such as the Association of American University Presses, Bookbuilders West, and the Chicago and Philadelphia Book Clinics.

He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with his wife and two daughters. He is leader and founder of the Skin and Laser Center in Bern since and president of interdisciplinary college at Klinik Siloah since Furthermore, he is acting as entrepreneur, board member, consultant and speaker for more than 15 years.

To minimize the potential risk of laser treatments, a fond knowledge of proper endpoints and warning signs is required. In order avoid such complications, a structured approach will be proposed, helping the treating physician to achieve the optimal result. Here, she focuses on laser medicine and aesthetic dermatology. With a strong scientific focus and a postdoctoral training at the Harvard Medical School, she aims to structure and improve current aesthetic dermatology practices.

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