Official: preprint server

The review process of your paper might take a long time with no guaranteed success. To establish your scientific priority immediately, you can submit your paper in addition to an established preprint server.

Realize that some journals, including Nature and Science, do not allow this parallel publication channel.

In exceptional cases (<10%) you might want to put off the point in time that your colleagues can inspect your results to the latest possible moment. In such a case you should not submit to the digital archive. In all other cases inclusion in the database is beneficial.

Unofficial publishing

There are a number of scientific manuscripts that will not be published in an international journal, among which: (undergraduate and graduate) theses, grant proposals, and internal reports.

Even if your paper will be published, you might be inclined to supply colleagues with other possibilities, like web posting, of obtaining your paper.

Format

For these unofficial papers you are the master of the format and free in the choice of the formatter. The formatter will either be a member of the LaTex family, MS Word or the like, or an html editor.

In the majority of cases the final form of your paper will be in pdf or in html format.

Put a copy of the web-posting file(s) also in your folder on the group server.

Pdf files

Nowadays making high-quality pdf files is a piece of cake with the Tex-family. If you use dvips, just use the -Ppdf option. Making a pdf file out of an MS Word document is best done with Adobe PDFMaker, a very buggy, but very useful software utility supplied with Adobe's Acrobat. Unfortunately starting from version 7 Adobe does not supply this piece of software anymore. The new Adobe Pdf printer driver is much less powerful. So please, if you upgrade, keep an old version of Acrobat as well. In MS Office 2007 files can finally be exported as pdf.

Pdf fonts

When using a Windows postscript driver, avoid using Type 3 fonts by preventing the driver from sending the fonts as bitmaps. The pdf file should only contain Type 1 and TrueType. Please check the absence of Type 3 fonts before distributing your pdf file (File, Document Properties, Fonts). Consult an article from the Adobe knowledge base for details.