Friday, January 17, 2003

Electronic Publishing

A talk to a delegation of Chinese publishing executives introducing the broad range of activities and issues around the idea of the computer as publishing medium.

A notice about this visit can be found here

Electronic Publishing can mean many things to many different people. It can include ebooks, web sites, desktop publishing, computer games, interactive television,talking books and new technologies such as g3 phones and PDA (Personal Digital Assistants).

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Wednesday, January 15, 2003

Netscape 4

Recent comments on the last post have prompted me to look again at this Netscape 4 issue. It turns out that there are still some people around who are using Netscape version 4, in spite of the fact that it was released in 1997 (5 years ago!). Netscape is currently freely available version 7.

I suspect that many web designers don’t have a copy of Netscape version 4 knocking around. I suggest that all web designers dust off any old pentiums or PowerPCs and install a copy of the old browsers.

What’s that? You lost the old browser software installers?

Read on ::::::::::::

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Friday, December 27, 2002

I wish the WEB existed 20 years ago!

Between 1975 and 1989 I formed a collection of photographs of megalithic sites around the British Isles. For several summers I travelled the British Isles taking black and white and colour photographs. The original idea was to follow the list from ‘Megalithic Sites’, Alexander Thom, OUP, 1967. Many of the photographs have been published over the years, but how I wish the Internet existed in those days. Well, in fact, I wish desktop / laptop computers were available then. I spent hours in the darkroom (I can smell the chemicals now) crafting beautiful black and white photographic prints, many were exhibited.

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Saturday, December 21, 2002

Word Documents to screen as PDF

Output to Acrobat PDF
When there is an absolute requirement to maintain the exact look of the MS Word document and still deliver on the web then the solution is to output to PDF [portable document format]. This is the standard format, created by Adobe to facilitate the transfer of documents for print and screen.

Learn about PDF on Adobe’s web site.

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Monday, December 16, 2002

Word Documents to screen as HTML

I’ve been considering this issue lately for a couple of reasons.  I manage the web site for a large faculty in a University and find that I am often asked to transfer documents created for paper to the web. Most of these documents have been created in Microsoft Word and are most often designed for paper, though I use the term ‘design’ very loosely!

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