PARALLEL PROCESSING tools for today's optiker

Electronic Information

A Scientific Word Processor

BY BOB JOPSON

This month's column describes Scientific Word, a widely avail­

able program for PCs that can be used to produce neatly formatted technical manuscripts.

One of the great benefits the In­ternet offers authors is the ability to submit manuscripts to journals and conferences electronically. But un­fortunately, the needs of scientists and engineers are not a high priori­ty for the companies that dominate the word processor and browser markets. As a consequence, the de­velopment of tools for disseminat­ing technical information has tended to lag behind the develop­ment of products that appeal to a wider public. This situation is painfully evident to authors who need to prepare technical manu­scripts. Two formats commonly ac­cepted for electronic submission are Microsoft Word and LaTeX. It is quite tedious to enter equations in Word and the formatted results usu­ally leave a lot to be desired, even af­ter tweaking. Typeset text created using LaTeX is easy to read and vi­sually appealing but many people do not want to expend the effort necessary to learn how to use this program. Scientific Word offers a compromise: it employs LaTeX-type formatting alongside a number of the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) features associated with Microsoft Word.

Loading Scientific Word is simi­lar to loading most programs. Insert

the CD-ROM, answer a few ques­tions and wait 10 or 15 minutes. A full installation consumed 195 MB of hard drive space on my Windows 95 system.

You can start by clicking, in se­quence, START, Programs, Scientific Word 3.0, Scientific Word 3.0. To learn how to use the program, click on Help, then Contents and Learn the Basics. I found it useful to go through the tutorial for creating a simple document. It explains how to use the Text Mode and the Math Mode: in the first, you enter text in the familiar way; in the second, you can enter symbols and mathemati­cal constructs like fractions and summations. These can be entered either with the mouse or by typing shortcuts. An example of a shortcut is that Greek symbols can be input by entering control g and then a corresponding Latin letter, or by holding the control key down while typing the symbol name. For in­stance, you can enter a γ by typing control g and then G, or by holding the control key down while you type "Gamma."

Scientific Word comes with many "style" templates suitable for a variety of purposes. More than 40 of these templates are included un­der "Journal Articles." Examples of these are templates for IEEE Trans­actions, the Geophysics Journal and REVTeX-OSA. If you plan to use one of these templates, you should look through the tutorial "Creating an advanced document." It will show you how to copy the template, delete the explanatory text in the template, and key in your manu­script. It also shows you how to manage citations. When entering the text, you provide a key word for each citation. These keywords are matched to those provided when entering the bibliography. This al­lows automatic renumbering of ci­tations when the manuscript is

modified. The numbering of equa­tions, theorems and like objects is handled in a similar manner.

The REVTeX-OSA template that comes with the program is not the most recent version. A newer one can be downloaded from Optic­sNet, www.osa.org. Click on Publi­cations, Journals, then Submissions under the desired journal. Now you can click "Creating a TeX File," which will yield a page with the download link, P C - D O S . The downloaded file will be a zipped file that will unzip into a number of files, some of which you need. A safe strategy is to copy all the files into the folder in which your man­uscript will reside.

Consider Optics Express. After starting Scientific Word, open the template file for Optics Express: OEstyle.tex. To preview and print it, click on Typeset, then Preview. You may see some error messages caused by the filenames of EPS files in the download not being quite right, but you can bypass them by hitting ENTER. When done, the typeset document will appear on a preview window from which you can print. You can use this tem­plate as a model for your manu­script. Whenever you modify the manuscript you should "Save" it before previewing it to ensure that the previewer functions properly. You may encounter problems caused by the presence of TeX commands in the text of the tem­plate. These problems can be elimi­nated by using a text editor such as Notepad to delete a section of text near the middle of the template file. This section of text contains the commands "/author" and "/email."

Scientific Word offers a compro­mise to those who want the advan­tages offered by TeX, but do not want to program in TeX or LaTeX. You can't learn to use Scientific

36 Optics & Photonics News/August 2000

PARALLEL PROCESSING tools for today's optiker

Word by intuition alone, but after an hour or two in the tutorials, you too will be enjoying the fine formatting it provides.

Bob Jopson, who works on lightwave systems at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, can be reached at vlrgln@lucent.com.

Patent Design

Macro Attachment For a Photographic

Objective

BY J. BRIAN CALDWELL

Patent: U.S. 6,002,533 Issued: December 14, 1999 Title: Close-Up Attachment Lens Example: #1 of 3 Inventor: Shuji Yoneyama Assignee: Asahi Kogaku Kogyo

Kabushiki Kaisha

A theoretically perfect lens forms a perfectly sharp image of a sin­

gle object plane onto a single image plane. If the lens is focused on a dif­ferent object plane, however, aber­rations are introduced.1 In most cases, the dominant aberration in­troduced by such a conjugate shift is coma, although the introduction of spherical aberration and lateral chromatic aberration can also be significant depending on the appli­cation. The change of aberration correction with a change in conju­gates limit the acceptable magnifica­tion range of all high quality fixed focal length photographic objec­tives, and this range tends to de­crease as the aperture is increased.

For example, 35mm objectives are generally useful over a magnifi­cation range of zero to -0.1. Aberrations in­troduced by changing magnification also limit the theoretical perfor­mance of zoom lenses because at least one zooming group, usually called the variator,2

must undergo a signifi­cant magnification change during zooming in order to change the focal length.

Figure 1. 100mm f /4 photographic objec­tive with and without macro attachment.

Optics & Photonics News/August 2000 37