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The web version of the 1998 Fox Chase Scientific Report uses native HTML to produce a easily viewable, online copy of the paper bound versions of the 1998 Report. For this reason, most people with newer personal computers (PCs and Macs) and reasonably up-to-date web browsers should be able to view these reports without problems.
To successfully view the reports from our main navigation screens, we recommend
the following:
At the time of this writing, there is no perfect vehicle for the web-based publication of scientific material containing special characters and complex graphics. Current versions of HTML have a deficiency for scientific publication in that many characters commonly used by scientists in describing their research are not part of the general character sets on many online browsers. Detailed research images are also difficult to convert to the GIF/JPEG/PNG format without some loss of fidelity, and potential artifacting problems. Note the forthcoming XML standard, a richer SGML implementation than HTML, will likely address many of these problems. Imaging remains a particular problem, as the graphs, charts, and illustrations in the Report are built by many scientists using an extremely diverse collection of software. Much of the computer generated artwork in the report comes from highly specialized programs in the area of a particular discipline. In many cases, only a handful of people in the world use these programs; often they are built by individuals highly knowledgeable in their field of study, but often not conversant with applicable graphics standards necessary for rendering acceptable images on the web without loss of fidelity. Often these images are complex, and result in large image files, which load slowly over modem and other online communications lines.
A copy of the report in Adobe Acrobat is planned, to produce a highly accurate, scalable, and printable online copy virtually identical with the paper copy of the report.
These reports were developed using Netscape Communicator as part of the development tool, and as the benchmark browser. As such, it is the preferred platform.
To render a full set of greek letters and scientific notation, the 1998 Scientific Report makes use of both the standard HTML Special Characters as well as the font face "Symbol". Symbol is which is a standard font on most PC's and Macs. Unfortunately, this is not a standard X-Windows font in the Unix/Linux community. Internet Explorer on the Macintosh also does not always recognize the Symbol font. While some versions of various Unix window managers include this font, others do not. We suggest if you are having this problem that you either pickup the PDF version of the file for printing, or view the report on a PC or a Mac.
The Fox Chase Scientific Report is a description of the work of many individuals who perform ongoing research in a variety of fields, such as molecular biology, structural biology, clinical oncology, immunology, virology, epidemiology, human genetics, and so on. Faculty reports are written in a variety of word processing and other specialized computer formats, depending on the needs of the field. These reports are then imported into Adobe FrameMaker, formatted, grouped into sections, and output to a Postscript representation of the report suitable for high end photo-typesetting. At the same time, the book is output directly to Adobe PDF format, suitable for direct inclusion into a web site. A series of custom written programs, written in the Perl language and driven by templates, then perform such tasks as generating the Table of Contents, and wrap the navigational component of the web site around the PDF files, resulting in the web site as you see it. Once the report fully proofread and ready to go to the phototypesetter, the generation of the web site, which contains over 350 files, takes less than 30 seconds and requires no human intervention.
The 1998 edition is the fifth of these Reports to be placed on the World Wide Web.
The FrameMaker+SGML product is specifically designed to handle the specialized needs required for book publication and high end phototypesetting applications. We have used the application in various forms since 1992 when the first fully electronic version of these Reports was generated. The FrameMaker product supports microkerning, microleading, color separations, conditional text and graphics, and multiple non-consecutive text flows. Special support for book publishing includes extensive support for for section, chapter, and book grouping, as well as uniform character, paragraph, and page layout style sheets, which can be applied over the entire book. For example, the decision to change a font point size can be implemented as single change to a character style. This change then automatically propagates throughout not just the current file, but also to all other sections of the final document. The product has extensive support for word processing and graphics file importation, which is heavily used in the process of designing the Report. An Adobe supplied API is available to drive specialized applications related to the typesetting process, and enhance the functionality of the product. Direct output to PDF and HTML is possble, and this uses some of the latest web based technology, such as cascading style sheets. Finally, the resulting postscript generated for export to phototypesetters fully adheres to all published Document Structuring Convention standards, and is itself highly customizable, giving a high end user great flexibility to provide additional style and structure to the resulting documents.
Although the SGML component of FrameMaker was not used in the 1998 Report, we plan to employ it to further streamline the publishing process in the future.
We usually distribute bound copies of the Report on a first come, first
served basis. If you wish a paper bound copy, please write to us at the
following address: