Electronic Astrophysics Journal

Electronic Astrophysics Journal

Product

This was a ground-breaking effort to bring one of the first top-level technical journals to the Web.  It provides not only an set of images of pages that can be viewed from any browser, but also full-text search capabilities and references in the text that are all hotlinks to the articles themselves or abstracts.

What we provided

At the time this project was started, few, if any browsers supported the Greek alphabet, let alone the specialized symbology used in astrophysics. Papers were submitted to the journal in electronic form, using a mathematical typesetting language derived from LaTeX. The challenge was to build a conversion system that would:

• Work in an automated way -- publication schedule required no manual editing of generated HTML.
• Automatically resolve references to external sources into web links.
• Generate inline GIF images to represent the characters and equations that could not otherwise be displayed on a browser
• Generate an index that could be used by a fulltext search engine powerful enough to answer queries such as "give me any article in which 'quasar' appears near 'pulsar'.

We collaborated on this project with people from various organizations spread across the United States. Our staff worked specifically on the conversion from LaTeX into HTML, focusing on the generation of inline images of equations and on compilation of databases for automatic linking. We also recommended which algorithms would be most efficient in operating the search engine.

The solutions generated by this project are in widespread use in the academic publishing community today.