SYNOPSIS

In report SEP-67 I wrote a paper entitled, ``Active documents and reproducible results'' that claims a revolution in education and technology transfer will follow from the merging of word processing and software command scripts. In this merging, called an active document (a-doc), the author attaches to every figure caption a pushbutton or a name tag usable to recalculate the figure from all its data, parameters, and programs. At my present stage, when plot files are absent or out-of-date the a-doc software regenerates them. So I see an a-doc as software that reproduces a document including the computations underlying the results and the conversion of those results to figures in the document. An a-doc provides a concrete definition of reproducibility in computationally oriented research. Given suitable interactive software, an active document is easily converted into an interactive document (i-doc) and we have begun some experimental work on i-docs.

The main lesson learned before SEP-67 was that authors and researchers should keep a meticulous accounting of how each figure is made, so that when the time comes, the figure regeneration procedure can be merged with the figure caption information in the word-processor software. Technically, the figure regeneration procedure we use is like the well-known ``makefile'' method of building UNIX system software.