In the age of electronic technical information, it is necessary to be able to present scientific documents efficiently in different form: online in the World Wide Web (Internet) or a corporate intranet, as a professional hardcopy in print and possibly in further variants. "Efficiently" means that the conversion process should be essentially automatical.
In this paper several possibilities of currently available methods shall be discussed. For some conversions scripts have been developed here.
In principle, the task requires a "master file" containing all factual information as well as the formatting information ("markup") directly or indirectly (via auxiliary files, "style sheets" etc.). The application of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) would be state of the art. Several parsers (sgmls, nsgmls) and DTDs (Document Type Definitions) as well as converters are freely available, e.g., qwertz-DTD, linuxdoc, gf with snafu-DTDs. It stands to reason that it should be possible to incorporate documents which are available in one of the popular formats such as Rich Text Format (RTF, from Microsoft Word) or LaTeX, and conversely, these formats should also be available as output formats. A further aspect would concern, e.g., the import of literature references from the results of database searches.
The inherent limitations of the different representations of documents deserve attention. Thus, there is no hypertext functionality in printed articles as a matter of fact, whereas the application of special symbols in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language, the language of the World Wide Web) currently is faced with difficulties. Although the Portable Document Format (PDF, Adobe) is more powerful with respect to the representation of special symbols and layout than the current versions of HTML and also offers hypertext functionality, it is proprietary and by no means an adequate substitute for HTML.