How to make your papers available for downloading

Making your papers available over the web is an effective and convenient way to get them read by others who may be interested in your work. Any paper you have presented at a conference certainly deserves to be available this way, and also class papers and manuscripts that you are ready to share with other linguists.

We have several pages dedicated to making it easier to find papers on the linguistics web server, so please follow these instructions to make your papers easy to find and the department's web site maximally useful.

  1. Convert your paper to PostScript. It is standard practice to make papers available in PostScript format, which is the language understood by most laserprinters. (Meaning that anyone with a laserprinter can print your paper without worrying about what editor you wrote it with, or what fonts you used).
  2. Put it in the ftp directory. We want papers to be available both through Netscape and through anonymous ftp (or Fetch). Because ftp is set up so that it can only retrieve papers from the ftp directory, your papers should go there. Then you can make a link to its location from your web page, and netscape can access it just as if it was in your own directory.
  3. Make a table of contents. You should make a page providing titles for your papers (and maybe short summaries), and links to the files in the ftp directory. It is useful to also have a version of this file, in plain text, in your ftp directory, called something obvious like CONTENTS.

There are also facilities for converting papers to HTML, so that they can be browsed online. If you do that, please don't neglect to also install a PostScript version of your paper-it's guaranteed to look nicer than HTML when you print it out, and also we want people to be able to find everyone's papers by browsing through the ftp server.

How to convert your document to PostScript

To convert a Macintosh Word document to PostScript, open it up and do the following:

  1. Make sure that a laserprinter (aries, for example) is the selected printer. If you are doing this on your own computer and you do not have a laserprinter, no problem: Configure your Mac as if you have a laserprinter (as a second printer), and make that the current printer.
  2. Select Print.
  3. In the dialog box there is a section called Destination; select File instead of Printer. The Print button now changes to Save; go ahead and press it.
  4. In the next dialog box, pull down the Font inclusion menu and select All but standard 13. This will include, for example, any phonetics fonts you used. Without this your file may not print correctly when others try to print it.
  5. Save the file somewhere it's easy to find.
  6. Transfer it to babel using Fetch (or any other means).

To convert your document to PostScript under Windows, the above process may give you a file that cannot print; do the following instead:

  1. Install a printer that prints to the "device" FILE:
  2. Select the "Postscript" or "Apple Laserwriter" device driver for it. (Do not select a Laserjet driver! Windows normally uses PCL with them, not PostScript). You may need a Windows installation disk for this step. You don't need to actually own a laserprinter.
  3. Make the FILE: device the current printer, and "print" the file from your text editor. It will prompt you for the name of a file to save in. (Make sure the file created is really a PostScript file).

Or, just load your file on a Mac and do it there. :-)

For LaTeX documents, all you need to do is run dvips, which creates the PostScript file. If your version of dvips sends its output directly to the printer, try invoking it (on Unix) as "dvips -f file.dvi > file.ps", or consult the manual page.

How to put your paper in the ftp directory

First convert your paper to PostScript and get it to babel. To keep the directions simple, let's say the paper is in a file called declaration.ps, your name is John Hancock, and you are a student.

  1. Go to the ftp directory by typing
    cd ~ftp/papers/students
  2. If you don't already have a directory there with your name, create one:
    mkdir hancock
  3. Go into the directory.
    cd hancock
  4. Copy the file from your home directory (~hancock) to your current directory.
    cp ~hancock/declaration.ps declaration.ps
  5. Make sure the directory (.) and the file are readable by everyone:
    chmod go+rx .
    chmod go+r declaration.ps

How to make a link to your paper

Assuming the example of the previous section, you can link to your paper by giving the following URL:

How to view and print PostScript files

This topic is covered on its own page, q.v.


[ up: Making Your Own Pages | Online Resources | Linguistics Home Page ]

alexis@ling.upenn.edu