The Proceedings were created using tools from previous ADASS conferences. The style file provided by ASP was based largely on the work of Jeannette Barnes and George Jacoby for ADASS V. The style file was augmented with HTML macros from the html style file provided with the latex2html package so that users would not have to additionally include the html style file. We also rewrote some of the macros to better handle underscores and tildes within URLs. Additional astronomical symbols and macros were added from the AASTeX style, created by Chris Beinesderfer. Finally, we added several new macros to aid indexing and cross-referencing. We would like to acknowledge the efforts of the editors of previous volumes, especially Harry Payne, Gareth Hunt, and Jeannette Barnes who happily discussed the challenges of editing an ADASS volume. This year, all submissions were received electronically via ftp.
The book was created from a master latex file that included the individual contributions on-the-fly during the document processing. Several tools written in Perl were used to filter and search submissions. GNU make was used to manage the creation of the book, which included a combination of filtering, latex, and dvips to make the final output file. An HTML version of the Proceedings is being made available on-line by the use of latex2html (version 98.2 beta5).
The work of editing the manuscripts was divided among the three editors with each responsible for editing about forty papers. Access control was provided by Revision Control System (RCS), which allowed the editors to simultaneously edit the individual manuscripts. The book itself is the first ADASS proceedings to be submitted electronically as a PostScript file to ASP for printing.
In 1999, a permanent repository (adass.org) is being set up for all ADASS materials including information of ADASS conferences, pointers to ADASS related news groups and web pages and past proceedings. The editing tools we used, including the Perl scripts, styles, and our Makefile as well as editorial notes will be made available at the new ADASS web site.