Making a Book from Contributed Papers: Print and Web Versions

HARRY PAYNE
Space Telescope Science Institute, Maryland
payne@stsci.edu

Abstract:  In my field (astronomy), it is common practice for conference proceedings to be generated from a collection of contributed papers, each of which is a stand-alone L^ATEX document. Editors are expected not only to edit the individual contributions but also to combine them into a book, with a table of contents and proper page numbers, in spite of the fact that publishers generally provide little more than a style file and instructions for the individual authors.

In my talk, I will describe a set of tools that I have used on several conference proceedings projects. The basic idea is to process the individual contributions into chapters, suitable to be \input into a skeleton document, allowing the entire book to be processed as a single L^ATEX document. All of the processing is managed by the UNIX make utility, and performed with perl and sed scripts. One advantage to this scheme is that references to other papers in the same volume may be supplied with a page number in a straightforward way. Another is that the entire book may then be processed with latex2html to produce a Web version from the same set of input files. Recent examples may be seen at

• http://www.stsci.edu/stsci/meetings/lisa3/, the third conference on Library and Information Services in Astronomy

• http://www.stsci.edu/stsci/meetings/adassVII/, the seventh annual conference of the Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems Conference series.

In these examples, the output from latex2html has itself been processed through other perl scripts, and a lot of hand editing. The scheme has been used for volumes in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific Conference Series and the Kluwer IAU Conference Series. The tools will be made freely available via the Internet.