Preparation of electronic documents for publication

Formal design of the document

The formal design of an electronic document depends heavily on the word processing system used and the formal and aesthetic wishes of the author or their department. Due to the resulting complexity, only incomplete information is available on this topic.

The Freiburg University Library has produced a tutorial on electronic publishing that is particularly suitable for Windows users.

Werkzeuge zur Erstellung einer PDF-Datei

Adobe Acrobat

The most comprehensive tool for the direct creation and post-processing of PDF files is Adobe Acrobat with the program modules Acrobat Writer and Acrobat Distiller (not to be confused with the free Acrobat Reader for reading and printing PDF files). The Adobe software can be obtained as part of a campus license, further information on ordering software for institutes can be found here.

Adobe Acrobat offers a range of security settings for a PDF file. When publishing on hohPublica, no security settings may be set, as users of the documents offered should be able to work as barrier-free as possible with electronic publications.

Office programs

In principle, most office programs such as Microsoft Office, OpenOffice and LibreOffice offer the option of exporting the document to a PDF file. In addition to the "Export" function, the option to print to PDF format is often also available via the print function.

Other writing programs

Other writing tools such as LaTeX are designed for publication in PDF format and offer corresponding functions for exporting to PDF format.

File naming

There should be no umlauts or spaces in the file name. Instead, underscores (_) can be used (e.g. Diss_Mustermann.pdf).

Ideally, you should follow the ISO 9660 naming convention:

• File name with max. 8 characters
• File names may only contain the letters A to Z without accents, the digits 0 to 9 and the underscore

Optical character recognition (OCR)

In order to ensure the most accessible and effective scientific work possible with the published documents, it must be possible to search, mark and copy texts for direct quotations. OCR text recognition is a prerequisite for this to be possible from the documents.

When creating a PDF from the tools mentioned above, this is usually already guaranteed directly. If the PDF document is the result of a scan, OCR text recognition may need to be triggered separately. This function is available in Adobe Acrobat Pro, for example.

Special book scanners can convert the scan of a text directly into PDF format, including OCR text recognition.

Security settings

HohPublica would like to enable users to work with the documents as barrier-free as possible within the framework of copyright and citation law. Therefore, no restrictive security options are accepted in the PDF documents.

The document must fulfill the following requirements in order to be published on hohPublica:

• It must be possible to search, mark and copy parts of text for direct citing.
• It must be possible to print the document or parts of it without any obstacles.
• The document must not contain any password protection.