Paper Layout Document

Layout professional papers with HTML

Alex Nicolaou




Abstract

Professional quality publications in HTML are hard to find because the formatting quirks of HTML are not well known. This template provides an easy way to produce a paper that looks nicely formatted so that you can publish your work in HTML without being embarrassed by how it looks.
The paragraph indenting, text layout, and colour ideas are all taken from David Siegel's pages that contain advice on how to build professional quality sites. I recommend anyone publishing anything on the web have a look at his site and get some ideas.



Using the Template


The side column is intended for notes and small diagrams that might typically appear in a side column for an article.
This template is meant to be downloaded and used to write your own articles. The HTML is extensively commented, so just load it into a text editor and go from there!
To do that, choose View Source from the menus of your browser. Then copy the source into a window where you can edit it, save it, and you are ready to start writing.
Now, it will be obvious as soon as you look at the source that the viewer needs a graphical browser to read the document. For my articles, I anticipate that graphics will be needed for diagrams and equations anyway, so I didn't worry about requiring a graphical browser. I'm testing my own documents with Netscape 2.0, so of course they will look ok viewed with that browser. If you have another browser that is graphical but can't view this template properly, let me know.
The real trick is lining up your notes.
In order to get a nicely lined up note inside your paper, you need to start a new table for your paragraph. Then you can put the note in and it will line up with the top of your paragraph, or you can set the alignment to do something different if you want a particular effect.
Use lots of tables.
In fact, in the end it is probably easiest just to start a new table for every paragraph if you have a lot of notes. Also, if you start getting weird formatting problems, try clearing your disk and memory cache to see if it is really Netscape's fault rather than your own formatting. ∫_a_^b^{f(x)1+x} dx