The Critical Rationalist

ISSN: 1393-3809

Electronic Formats and Encodings

Each issue of TCR generally contains a single article, and is made available in multiple formats and encodings.

All formats include mutually consistent section and paragraph numbering. Please do not use page numbers in citing material in TCR articles--page numbers may not exist, or may be mutually incompatible between different formats; use the section and/or paragraph numbers instead.

The following is a summary of the different formats and encodings which are used for disseminating TCR articles; note that a given article will not necessarily be available in all variations of format or encoding.

• [.html] denotes the HTML format. This is recommended for interactive reading on a computer (on- or off-line) only .

  A printed or hardcopy version of an article can be generated by printing the HTML version using your browser's print function. However, this is not recommended and should be considered only as a last resort. The HTML format is optimised for computer based reading. Each article is normally divided into a number of separate HTML nodes which would have to be separately, and manually, downloaded and printed; furthermore, the quality of typesetting (font resolution, layout etc.) of the resulting hardcopy will generally be significantly inferior to that available from the Postcript, PDF or DVI formats, described below.

• [.pdf] denotes the PDF, or Portable Document Format. This format is generally recommended for printing of hardcopy.

  PDF can be viewed and printed using either of the following free tools:

  • Ghostscript/Ghostview/GSview
  • Acrobat Reader: Available from Adobe Systems Inc. . You will need version 3.0 (or later) of the reader.

• [.ps] denotes the Postscript format. Again, this is suitable for printing of hardcopy, and is especially convenient if you have access to a Postscript printer.

• [.dvi] denotes the DVI or ``device independent'' format produced by the TeX electronic typesetting software.

  If you have TeX software installed on your system, this format may also be another good alternative for obtaining hardcopy. The DVI files are generally significantly smaller than Postscript or PDF, and thus faster to download. However, you must have a DVI ``driver'' for your particular printer; and your system will also generally have to be able to generate the specific fonts required by the DVI file.

• The HTML format may also be offered with two alternative archived and compressed encodings, denoted by an extra .zip or .gz suffix.

  Either of these can be used to efficiently download the complete collection of files making up the HTML format article, for convenient offline viewing. Note that it is essential to ensure that subdirectory structure is preserved when unpacking these archives; if necessary, check the documentation of whatever tools you are using to see how to do this.

• Similarly, the PDF, Postscript and DVI formats may also be offered with two alternative compressed encodings, again denoted by an extra .zip or .gz suffix. These are substantially smaller than the uncompressed files, and thus may offer significantly faster downloading--but will have to be locally decompressed before viewing or printing.

• The .zip encodings are generated with the InfoZip zip compression/archival tool and should be extractible with any compatible unzip tool, including PKWare's pkunzip and InfoZip's own unzip. The latter is freely available for many platforms--for more information, check the InfoZip Web Site . For MS-Windows platforms, you may want to consider the (commercial) WinZip package.

• The .tar.gz and .gz encodings are generated with the standard Unix tar and gzip tools, which should be available on any Unix platform.