Subject: Journal appearance

Date: Fri, 8 Jul 1994 08:45:00 +0500

The look and feel of EJTES:

An electronic journal has some disadvantages compared with a paper journal:
you can't easily stuff it in your pocket, read it in bed, or riffle through 
the pages to find some page whose layout you remember; but it also has some 
advantages: easy to search, and supports hypertext interlinking.  I think we 
need to fully exploit the advantages to make the new journal acceptable to our 
readers.  The following are my ideas about the appearance of EJTES to readers 
and how this appearance can be achieved.  From discussions with Tony Trent, I 
believe these ideas can be implemented in Adobe Acrobat, but our primary aim 
should be to find the ideal appearance at this stage.  Can you improve on these 
ideas?

Basil

ACCESS TO EJTES

Readers will log on to the ASA computer.  Initially, the ASRR computer at 
Beltsville will double as the ASA computer.  The first screen will be a fixed 
screen with a banner for EJTES and ASA.  Below that there will be "hot" 
hypertext buttons for "publication policy", "list of keywords", "boolean 
search of journal" and "titles published in past year."  Choosing "boolean 
search..." will produce a fixed screen with a data entry window where the 
keywords and logic words can be entered.  A boolean search, or choosing 
"Titles published in past year" will produce a scrollable list of articles 
with Title, author(s), affiliation(s), and abstract.  There should be some 
simple way of marking articles in the list for downloading to the reader's 
own machine.  The full text of an article will only be accessible by 
downloading the article.  This is to prevent people bogging down the computer 
and modems by reading articles on-line.  

LAYOUT OF ARTICLES as seen in reader's own computer

As normally prepared for submission to paper journals: with the text going the 
full width of the page (single column) and tables and figures separate from the 
text.  The captions would be included with the figures and tables.  In the 
text, references to tables and figures would be hot buttons which would call 
up the thing referenced.  Each table and figure would have a button to return 
the reader to the text.  Immediately under the title, authors and affiliations 
would be hot buttons to jump the reader to major subdivisions of the article, 
e.g. abstract, main text, code, etc.  All text should be in scrollable windows.

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