Publication Tool descriptions

Publication Tool descriptions

My publications have been constructed with a variety of tools.

Antenna simulations were performed with NEC-2 (NEC81) which runs on an IBM compatible PC in real-mode.

I developed a program library based on my NECU.PAS which can be used to write programs to generate geometry and necessary input data for NEC-2. (Pascal was chosen as it is a very fast compiler - future development will be done in C++.) Programs that use NECU generate embedded comment commands that are passed through to the NEC-2 output stream.

I developed EXTRACT.EXE which is used to extract and reduce output data from NEC-2. The program uses the embedded comments generated from the NECU suite to obtain antenna parameters that are not normally available in NEC-2 output. EXTRACT produces my proprietary .PLT files.

The earlier original documents were developed using Word for Windows 5 and 6.0 and the graphs were produced by PLOT.EXE a tool I developed from the source code offered by Boston Scientific and Engineering. This tools accepts a proprietary high-level description of points and plots them either to the screen or a printer driver that I wrote for a Canon laser printer LBP-4. (This is a DOS rather than Windows program.)

Later developement saw my migration to tools supported under Microsoft Windows 3.11, and a change of job saw me using Microsoft Windows 95, so I could take advantage of the large number of printer drivers that are available. I didn't want to write a printer driver everytime I moved jobs.

I later developed CSV.EXE which takes my .PLT formatted files and produces a comma separated list file which can be imported into Microsoft Excel - where further data manipulation is necessary to obtain a graph. (This step can probably be eliminated if I start using Math Lab.)

Most CAD drawings have been performed with Canvas. Some have been done by the publisher with Turbo CAD. I hope to start using Turbo CAD 3.01.

Document authoring has been performed with the aid of Microsoft Word.

Some web pages were constructed with HOTDOG professional, others were constructed with Netscape Gold.

Document conversion to HTML was performed with Georgia Tech GT_HTML 6.0d.

I am about to use the free Microsoft Internet Assistants for Word and Excel to determine if they are suitable for HTML conversion. These features and more will be offered in Microsoft Office 97.

Some images where scanned via a Plustek Optic Pro 4800P parallel printer port scanner.

Microsoft also offes a Word Document Viewer than can be freely distributed around the net.

Copyright (c), Ralph Holland, 28 Mar 97, Last update 4 Apr 97.