EP98 - the Seventh Conference on Electronic Publishing
by Jacques André
INRIA recently organized (and ERCIM sponsored) EP98, the seventh
Electronic Publishing conference, in Saint-Malo, in the framework of a
week consecrated to digital documents and typography. This conference was
held from 1-4 April at Saint-Malo, France.
About three hundred people participated in the events, more than a half
having registrated to EP98 and its tutorials. Attendants came from America,
Far East and Europe (with a very great number of people from Finland) and
'even' from France (very few people actually!).
For twelve years, the series of EP meetings has been a hot spot for
technological watch. Indeed, it is at these meetings that such concepts
as active documents, document restructuring and so on, first appeared.
This year's conclusion is that research in this area is far from being
complete, even though the Web only seems to be concerned with the development
of commercial products these days. Some thought that the OpenType or MM
and Unicode fonts marked a pause. On the contrary, research is revealing
very novel openings in object-oriented or constrained character modelling
including non Latin characters, legibility on screens, etc. Others
opinions were that paper is out. On the contrary, the concept of intelligent
paper, that bridges the gap between the physical and digital worlds, puts
it back in the spotlight. Among the best lectures was the invited talk
from Grenoble-Xerox research center. Some thought that we knew how to manage
multimedia. On the contrary, Allen's logic opens up brand new and exciting
possibilities in terms of temporal management. In short, we are witnessing
a transition from a narrow and specialized technical subject to a wide
area of research, a new discipline.
Proceedings are available as:
- R.D. Hersch, J. André, H. Brown (Eds.): Electronic Publishing,
Artistic Imaging, and Digital Typography, 7th International Conference
on Electronic Publishing, EP'98. Held Jointly with the 4th International
Conference on Raster Imaging and Digital Typography, RIDT'98, St. Malo,
France, March/April 1998. Proceedings.
- LNCS 1375, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, 1998 . VIII, 575 pp. ISBN 3-540-64298-6,
Softcover, DM 114,- http://link.springer.de/link/service/series/0558/tocs/t1375.htm
The cover has been designed at EPFL, Switzerland by using very new imaging
technologies and can be found at: http://www.irisa.fr/ep98/BookCover.pdf
EP 2000 ?
This series is far from dying! Its main problem is to find its own approach,
to be independent of the Web fashion and far of the printing technology.
In that way, the EP steering committee is looking for an unambiguous new
acronym (EP seems to be too much printing oriented although EP means Electronic
Publishing whose meaning is broader than Editing!). Anyway, EP2000 should
be organized in the United States. Have a look at http://www.irisa.fr/ep98/ep00.html
Please contact:
Jacques André - INRIA-Rennes
Tel: +33 2 9984 7350
E-mail: jandre@irisa.fr
