Electronic journal formats

On the heels of the rapid growth of the World Wide Web have come advances in multimedia document formats and the hardware and software to support them. As a result of this combination of factors, the electronic journal is, at last, economically and aesthetically viable. This paper begins with an explanation of the two main forms of electronic journal dissemination at present, namely the CD-ROM and the Internet. It then goes on to discuss the major document formats currently being used in electronic journals: ASCII, bitmaps, LAT(E)X, PostScript, PDF, SGML and HTML. This is followed by a description of some of the formats used in multimedia and an introduction to the latest multimedia advances that may influence the electronic journals of tomorrow. A complete list of the journals and journal projects mentioned in this paper, together with the document formats they employ, are listed in Appendix 1. Appendix 2 compares the features of a typ-(sic).