Current Technical Report Information/Policy

Technical Report Coordinator:
Lindsay Michimoto (lindsaym at cs.washington.edu), CSE 130, phone: 206/543-1695

Updated: May 20, 2004

The following information is intended to help you understand how the technical report process works in general, bring you up-to-date on some of the additions and changes to policy and guide you on some of the newer features of producing and dispensing technical reports. If you have any questions or suggestions for this informational memo, please contact the technical report coordinator.

Publishing a Technical Report and obtaining a TR number:

Remember: a TR number cannot be given out without an explicit OK from a faculty member.

When you are ready to publish a technical report you will need a TR number. Please include this number on the title page. Our numbers are based on Year-Month-Sequence (not day). To obtain a TR number contact the TR Coordinator (listed above) and please be prepared to provide the following information via email:

title of the paper
all authors, listed IN ORDER
an ASCII version of the abstract

Once the OK is received from the appropriate faculty member, the TR Coordinator will respond via email with the TR number issued for that report. In addition, the author(s) need to provide:

the file path to the pdf or Postscript of your TR (see next section)

If this is not possible for your report, please let us know.

Making Technical Reports Available On-Line

Authors of CSE departmental technical reports are strongly urged to make their reports available on-line. This will not only help to distribute research results more widely, but it should also result in somewhat fewer hard copies being necessary (and thus possibly save trees, postage, etc.). It should also cut down on the overall administrative cost of TR distribution by putting more of the burden, however minimal, on the recipients. Also, by essentially permitting a kind of browsing from remote locations (using local viewers), readers may obtain hard copies (either from us or from their own printers) of only those reports that they have actually decided are worth extra attention.

The ready availability of new research papers in electronic form raises to some extent the level of temptation to unscrupulous plagiarizers.

Those who are interested in accessing your work should connect to our on-line archive using either anonymous ftp or WWW.

FTP users should connect to ftp.cs.washington.edu, and enter the user name "anonymous". (At the present time, ftp users can also connect to cs.washington.edu, but it is predicted that at some unspecified point in the future this will change.) Any password will be accepted for an "anonymous" user, but the standard practice is to enter an internet ID. Technical reports are in the directory named "tr". There are also two indexes and a read-me file available in this directory.

World Wide Web users will prefer to access the Technical Report archive through the department's web server. From the CSE home page, click 'Research Activities', then 'Technical Reports'. For direct access, the appropriate URL is:

http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/tr/techreports.html

This HTML document features several indexes and pointers to downloadable files.

PLEASE USE THIS MECHANISM FOR AS MANY OF YOUR TECHNICAL REPORTS AS IS POSSIBLE

Preparing the PostScript file

The requested file format is PostScript.

If your report consists of more than one file, you may use tar to create a single file archive. If your report contains large graphics (large in the bytes-of-storage-required sense), you may prefer to keep the small-ish textual parts separate from the large parts. This strategy avoids forcing the causal browser to download multi-megabytes just to read your abstract. If your end result consists of more than one file, please provide a README file to help the user make sense of it all.

You may want to use the following tools and techniques to convert various common file formats into PostScript:

From a dvi File. The lab-supported utility for converting a dvi file into PostScript is dvitps. It is recommended that you use the option - C to create a "conforming" file. This will make it possible for PostScript previewers to page backwards, and for printing software to print ranges of pages. This is a very nice feature, especially for large documents, since some people still have printers with only 1MB of memory. One annoyance with dvitps is that when the results are previewed, the copyright/version message is displayed.
Another tool, dvips may be preferred over dvitps. Dvips is unsupported. It creates conforming PostScript by default.
From a troff File. The standard local filter for converting ditroff output to PostScript format is "/usr/local/ditroff/dps." The filter pscat may be used to convert C/A/T format files produced by the original troff. With groff, use the option -Tps to produce PostScript output.
From a Macintosh. To generate a PostScript file, use one of the following techniques:
- Under Macintosh System 7 (or when using LaserWriter driver version 7.x or 8.x with System 6.0.x ), after giving the Print command, click the button in the dialog that says "PostScript File," then click "Save." Note that LaserWriter driver version 8 is generally preferred for producing PostScript documents.

- Under System 6.0.x when using the system 6 LaserWriter extension, hold down Option-k immediately after clocking the "print" button in the print dialog box. To save without the MacDictionary, use Option-f instead.

Further documentation concerning the creation of PostScript files, and the integration of graphics into PostScript files is available in CSE Lab Technote #166. Copies of this are available in Sieg 114, or on-line via emacs info mode. The lab staff will attempt to help with other questions you may have.

Submitting the file

Submit the following to the TR-coordinator listed at the top of this document, who will forward it to the person responsible for managing the TR database and local archive.

The name of the file/directory which contains your TR (in a suitably unprotected place).
TR number
Title
Author(s)

Files will be compressed prior to installation in the ftp directory. Entries will be added to the indexes available in this directory.

Technical Report Distribution

The CSE department no longer has a contract with Research Access Incorporated (RAI) to distribute our TR's to commercial users. All distribution is handled via downloads from the web, or in the case of older TRs, via hardcopy distribution.

How to obtain a hard copy of CSE Technical Reports

A limited number of extra copies of Technical Reports dating from 1990 to 1995 are currently available and in stock. Please see the TR Coordinator for more information.

Please note, if the TR is available on-line, additional copies will not be made for these files.

If people ask you how they can receive technical reports from this department please tell them to:

send their request to tr-requests@cs.washington.edu,

Computer Science & Engineering
University of Washington
Box 352350
Seattle, WA 98195-2350
(206) 543-1695 voice, (206) 543-2969 FAX
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