Eprint technicalities

Some notes about the eprints

Not all preprints have the figures included, especially for most of the older preprints we often no longer have the figures in their original electronic format; maybe in the future we can scan them and include them again.
Remember that the eprints may differ from the final published from.

TeX files

The TeX-files and possible PostScript figures are packed in a uuendoded, gzipped tar file in one selfextracting c-shell script that is generated with the Unix version of uufiles. If you are unfamiliar with uufiles, the resulting encoded file constains some notes on how to unpack it.

The eprint source files are all LaTeX files, that require LaTeX2ε to be processed. The preprints need the REVTeX macros (REVTeX 3, or REVTeX 4) from the American Physical Society. PostScript figures are included with the graphics or graphicx packages for LaTeX2ε.

PostScript files

The PostScript version of eprints are compressed using gzip in order to reduce the size of the file that is sent. Your browser needs to be configured appropriately to gunzip the file (which should be done be default in contemporary browsing environments) and launch a PostScript viewer.

The fonts in the files are included as type1 fonts. That makes the files somewhat larger, but the fonts can be used at any resolution. This will improve the quality of printing and viewing on a wider range of hardware.

For viewing PostScript files, ghostscript is free and available for a huge range of platforms.

PDF files

Your browsers needs to be configured appropriately to launch a PDF viewer, or a PDF plugin to view the file.

Many of the PDF files do have hyperlinks; internally between pictures, tables and references, and sometimes also to external URLs.

PDF viewers:

Adobe Acrobat Reader: from Adobe. Freely available for some of the most used platforms. It is quite fancy with lots of features, but it may require a lot of the resources of your computer.
Ghostscript and ghostview: Freely available for a huge number of platforms. Ghostscript versions 4.0 and newer are able to interpret PDF and is very good at it. It is much faster than the Adobe Acrobat Reader and better readable. Unless you really like the bells and whistles of the Adobe Acrobat Reader, ghostscript can be recommended.
Xpdf: Free PDF viewer for the X-window system. Very fast and often better readable than the Adobe Acrobar Reader.