The course surveys the use of computer graphics in producing technical publications with good quality illustrations. As a survey, it does not provide step-by-step solutions, but instead includes references for further study and investigation. To fully appreciate the course, a knowlege of programming and basic computer graphics techniques is required, although parts will be accessable to the general community.

This course is principally for programmers and researchers working with or building technical publishing tools. It may also interest graphic designers who are acquainted with computer graphic techniques and want to learn more about how documentation graphics are accomplished.

The course assumes a general familiarity with computer graphics. Knowledge or interest in the field of technical publishing would be helpful.

This course surveys computer graphic techniques applied to the production of illustrations for technical publications. The lectures reference published material but also gather unpublished research and techniques into a useful set of course notes. The survey begins with issues of quality and typography in the graphic arts world. The foundation for documentation graphics is laid by describing the two-dimensional device-independent imaging model that forms the basis for the page description languages Interpress, PostScript, and DDL. Then the sources of illustrations and their organization into documents are presented. The focus next shifts to the problems of rendering documentation graphics with the quality, style, and typography expected in technical publications. The final topic addresses automated techniques for creating graphical presentations. Throughout the course, unsolved problems and thorny technical issues will be highlighted to point out areas needing further work.

This course is essentially the same as the one presented at SIGGRAPH '86 except that it has been updated to include 1987 standards and frontiers, such as color.

Richard J. Beach, Xerox PARC, Palo Alto, CA

Chuck Bigelow, Bigelow & Holmes, San Francisco, CA

Jock Mackinlay, Xerox PARC, Palo Alto, CA

Maureen Stone, Xerox PARC, Palo Alto, CA

Richard Beach manages the Imaging area of the Computer Science Lab at Xerox PARC. His research interests and publications lie in the areas of document composition, digital typography, interactive illustrators, table formatting, document interchange, and digital cartography. He operated a typesetting business that produced college-level computer science and mathematics text books for scholarly publishers using computer typesetting software. He was previously on the Computer Science faculty of the University of Waterloo teaching software engineering, operating systems, and programming languages.