SUGGESTIONS AND ADVICE FOR USING THE PROCEEDINGS
The CDROM Layout
This CDROM is the Proceedings for SUPERDARN-2000. It contains copies of most of the slide presentations given during the Meeting at Beechworth as well as explanatory papers for a number of these presentations. In addition, the CDROM contains the full set of abstracts, a list of the delegates, some movies and an eclectic collection of photographs taken during SD2000.
The Proceedings is organised on the CDROM in directories and it is intended that you initially read it using an HTML viewer (most likely the current version of either Netscape of MS Explorer). To start this process you were requested to read the file index.htm from the top directory. In addition to viewing presentations and papers on your screen, you can print the accompanying PDF version of the descriptive papers. If this proves awkward, for some reason, I have also included all the original papers as they were supplied to me in the directory papers.
There are seven directories on the CDROM. These are:
The Presentations
- During the SUPERDARN Meeting at Beechworth slides used during presentations were collected and photocopied and those where colour was important were scanned. Later, the black&white photocopies were scanned, resulting in a mix of coloured and B&W images.
- The full set of scanned images is 1.3GB in size. These images have been reduced to smaller jpeg images for viewing from the CDROM. If there are any images you wish to obtain the original scanned image of, please ask me to forward it to you. If there is enough interest I will place all the images on our ftp site.
- The jpeg images have been collected together in this Proceedings and are accessed by clicking on the word Presentation. This opens a page from which each of the scanned slides can be opened. On a computer with a fast hard disk drive, this is very easy to use. However, access from a CDROM may be rather slow. If you have the hard disk space (about 400MB), copy the entire CDROM to your disk before reading the papers.
The Papers
- All papers have been converted to PDF files and these are referenced from the session indexes. Provided you have the Acrobat reader installed and integrated with your browser, viewing and printing the papers should be easy. The Acrobat reader I used is available on this CDROM in the directory readers.
- The Presentations are intended to be supplementary to the descriptive papers supplied by authors after the meeting. In an attempt to ease the problems for paper authors, presentations were accepted in whatever format people found easiest to supply. The original papers are all available in the directory papers. Where possible, viewers have been obtained so that you can view each paper in its original format, and a format that can be handled by a freely available viewer (in this case PDF). Three viewers are supplied here: ghost for postscript files; acrobat and a Word viewer. They can be found in the readers directory and should be installed on your computer if you wish to read the files.
- If you use Explorer and have acrobat and word intergrated into it, you should find viewing the papers very easy. If you use netscape on a PC, as I do, you will find it more clumsy, but still relatively easy. If you use any other configuration, I hope there are not unexpected difficulties. If there are, I would appreciate hearing from you. I'd especially like to hear your solutions.
The Movies
- There are two types of movie on this CDROM. One set of movies was taken from the SUPERDARN Website, so if you have looked at the movies on that site previously, only one of these movies should be new. The movies are gif files and display directly in the comon browsers.
- The second movie was made from a video of the opening of the TIGER radar. The weather was far from ideal for making a video, and the movie file format is MOV. I have put a quicktime download file in the readers directory, in case you don't have a MOV reader, but you still need to be connected to the internet to complete the installation. Ray Morris arranged for the movie clip to be made at Antarctic Division.
Caveats
I hope you enjoy using the Proceedings. If you have any questions please contact me.
- I mainly used Netscape 4.08 for testing the files. I supplemented this by using Internet Explorer 5.00.2614.3500. Both browsers were running under Windows-98.
- There were differences between the two browsers. Occasionally Explorer did not display full presentation figures. Refreshing overcame that problem. Explorer also failed to highlight the figure currently being viewed, which was irritating.
- The files making up the Proceedings have all been constructed and tested on a PC. However, I have also tried to make sure they are fully compatible with UNIX by using lower case file names throughout. You may encounter some oversights if you read this from UNIX.
- I have used long file names throughout. I intended using short file names compatible with DOS, and older browsers but, I'm sorry, I forgot and by the time I remembered I did not have the time to revise all the file names. If you are caught by this, I hope you will still be able to print all the files and therefore read the Proceedings. If you cannot do this, please let me know and I will arrange for a hardcopy to be produced.
- I have included a Word viewer on the CDROM. There are two points about this. First, it may be possible to get a more recent version from the Microsoft site. Second, and more important, if you already have a version of Word be careful installing the viewer. It is possible to displace Word as the default for opening DOC files and to revert to Word as the default entails uninstalling the viewer and re-installing Word.
Phil Wilkinson
IPS Radio and Space Services
P O Box 1386
Haymarket
NSW 1240
AUSTRALIA
E-mail: phil@ips.gov.au