PDF, like postscript, supports colour, therefore colour will be visible on the screen when viewing the proceedings. Authors should not forget however, that the proceedings will also be published in book form which will be in black and white. The printer will render colours in greyscales and patterns and authors should inspect the black and white version of their printed paper to ensure that information is not lost due to the lack of colour.
For best results authors should use standard half-tones (NOT custom) and solid colour or grey fills.
EXCEL produces nice graphics relatively easily and allows you to print them to Encapsulated Postscript (EPS) files. However, it is very easy to end up with unnecessarily large files. This has been observed on several occasions and in each case was found to be the result of using custom line styles for grid lines on a graph. In one example, choosing default (auto) gridlines the EPS file reduced from >4 Mbytes to 37 kbytes and the visual result was not significantly different.
This gives very unpredictable results when trying to incorporate the EPS files in other documents. In most cases the graphics will have to be scanned and re-introduced into the original. Until the problems are understood, this software is not recommended.
In EPAC'96 and PAC'97 the use of this software caused many problems because the Encapsulated PostScript could not be processed correctly by the distiller. The result was a corrupted PDF file which was unusable and re-engineering each figure took many hours. Use of this software should be avoided.
Photo by Ugo Borsatti, Archivio Storico "Foto
Omnia"
