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5th Revision The force behind this fact sheet was the need to establish some uniformity for electronic media. In the recent past, a hard paper copy was the medium of choice for the vast majority of people. With the recent advent of the networked computer age, more and more people are exploring the use of paperless information dissemination. There are many different computer platforms -- i.e. DOS, WINDOWS, MAC, or UNIX, for example, and each with its own software. This fact sheet is an attempt to standardize electronic document preparation and allow more people access to the digital information. COPYRIGHT REQUIREMENTS When you submit a document, it is assumed that you have legal rights to distribute that item. Electronic medium is not that much different from printed medium as far as the copyright laws are concerned. All materials must have the written permission of the author and / or publisher. Copyright infringements are illegal. The Best Method -- HYPERTEXT HTML and SGML documents are the best method for Web Publishing. If you are desiring to place material on the WWW, you should explore the creation of HTML documents. Creating html documents, once the stomping ground for computer geeks, is now as simple as word processing. There are many HTML editors on the market, ranging in price from free to $500. Many of the "suite" programs - i.e. Microsoft's Office 97 or Corel's Word Perfect Suite, have built-in capabilities where one can choose to save his work in html. FrontPage 98 and Net Object Fusion are examples of site management software specifically designed for producing high quality html documents. Next Best POSSIBILITIES FOR SAVING YOUR DOCUMENT As the world evolves more toward the use of the World Wide Web (WWW) as the information provider of choice, your choices expand. If your document contains complexly-formatted text or a mixture of both text and graphics, you will want to save it directly into either;
Acceptable word processing software we have defined as either Microsoft's "Word" or Corel's "Word Perfect". Acceptable desktop publishing software is Adobe "Pagemaker 6.5". Note that use of Adobe Acrobat software allows documents to be printed or viewed without having access to the original creating software. More and more documents are appearing in Adobe Acrobat format on the Internet as it had solved many of the early problems associated with mixed text and graphics. However, HTML format remains the first choice due to normally smaller file size. GRAPHICS Graphic images are developed using a multitude of possible formats. Your submission should be either a GIF or a JPEG and limited to 256 colors. The higher the number of colors, the larger the file size for downloading. Graphics are large by nature. Large files must be downloaded to be viewed and significantly increase download time. Judicious use of image files enhance the attractiveness of the page and decreases download time. It is also recommended you don't save the file using any internal type of compression. This might sound contradictory, but not everyone will have a viewer that supports the various compression types. MULTIMEDIA Multimedia usage has been expanding. Multimedia includes computer files developed from sound clips, movie clips, slide presentations and quicktimes, for example. The drawback to sending these files electronically was their size. Streaming video and/or streaming audio technology was designed to address this problem. Network connections, ranging from 28.8 kbs modems to dedicated 100M/sec, may now access streaming files, each optimally designed for the download speed. Final Steps After following the above guidelines, the next step is transferring the files to AquaNIC. The method depends on whether you have internet access and how comfortable you are using it.
The last recommendation is that all file types be zipped or compressed subsequent to submitting. This will reduce the file size that you must submit to the information server.
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