Familiar software tools

My document is written in the popular L^ATEX word processing language which is freely available. I also use other freely available software that we have merged with our scientific software to produce reports which we preview on a screen. From a software point of view my new electronic book is almost identical to theses and reports prepared in our department, and it is little different from those prepared in many other departments here at Stanford University as well as at many other universities. The book contains figures resulting from mathematical analysis of data. These figures can be recalculated by pressing a pushbutton in the figure caption. I think it is a tragedy that doctoral dissertations do not offer the easy reproducibility that my book does, because it would only be a tiny bit of extra work for their authors. I believe many other people will recognize this too as soon they see how easy it is to do.

We built a figure inclusion command called activeplot in L^ATEX language which points to a figure-building command script (cakefile). The word processor now requires each author for each figure to supply a directory path and a ``target'' name. (or else to explicitly state that the figure is irreproducible. Nonreproducible figure file names are of the form NAME.ps.save). While the manuscript is being written, naming the command scripts is only a tiny burden on the author. Experience shows that this bit of information is often the key that gets lost.