Publishing on CD-ROM

The publishing industry is facing a major change in the near future as demand for publishing, distributing and storing of documents in electronic form continues to rise. Electronic publishing includes writing, storing, presenting and distributing documents in electronic form. It is a fast and economic way of publishing compared with traditional printing. Electronic publishing offers an alternative for distributing existing information but can also serve as the only form of publication, e.g. multimedia encyclopaedias. Electronic publications may be distributed on magnetic or optical media or via networks. It may not be rational to transfer a print publishing process as such to electronic publishing, but publishing process re-design is often needed. When converting to electronic publishing the user's needs should be the most mportant thing to consider. Other items to be taken into account are standards, computer platforms, software and problems that arise when documents contain text in various languages. In this project the basics of electronic publishing were inspected, a demonstration disc was produced, and practical steps for publishing on CD-ROM were presented. The main phases in producing a CD-ROM publication are: collection of data, data preparation, designing the database, indexing, linking, formatting, pre-mastering, mastering, and replication. CD-ROM discs are manufactured industrially but in small series may also be individually recorded. The multilingual material for the experimental phase of the project was acquired from the Nordic Council and the Nordic Council of Ministers. The test documents from each organisation were processed with four different publishing programs (Acrobat, DynaText, Folio Views and WordCruncher). A small scale experiment on multilingual search was implemented using the embedded thesaurus of WordCruncher software and the Nordic multilingual administrative dictionary (Nordisk förvaltningsordbok).