Demonstration of Ejournal Publication Formats
Demonstration of Ejournal Publication FormatsThis page contains samples of some of the most popular publication formats for electronic journals.
This stands for American Standards Committee on Information Interchange. What it means in practice is plain text, that is to say text which is readable directly without using any special software. The advantage of ASCII is that it is a lowest common denominator which can be displayed on any platform. The disadvantage is that it is rather limited and somewhat boring. The text cannot display bold, italics or underlined fonts, and there is no scope for graphics or hypertext. However, it is simple, can be read online (eg by Gopher or other software), and is almost idiot-proof as a means of information exchange. To see a short example of ASCII click HERE , or to see a journal article in ASCII click HERE .
This stands for Rich Text Format. RTF was developed by Microsoft as a universal wordprocessor format. Most modern software packages can read RTF, and the main advantage is that it allows the use of different fonts and retains many of the control codes which wordprocessors use. This means that when you open an RTF document you will see something pretty close to what the creator of the document saw. A big improvement on ASCII in attractiveness, but still no graphics capability. To see a quick example of RFT click HERE , or to see a journal article in RTF click HERE .
Adobe Acrobat is a Portable Document Format (PDF) which allows the cross-platform transmission of text and graphics. Acrobat takes the output from your wordprocessor and turns it into a file which when opened by someone else is guaranteed to look like the original even if they are using a different wordprocessor or a different platform (eg Mac instead of Windows). You need the free Viewer program to read and print out the files. Acrobat documents can incorporate hypertext links both internally and also other WWW sources. To see an example of Acrobat click HERE .
Return to the HyperJournal Home Page