Chin Med J (Taipei) 1998;61:S77.

Automating Web Pages of the Medical Journal with the Macro Language of a Word Processor

Fuh-Yuh Shiung, Tzeng-Ji Chen

Department of Family Medicine, Veterans General Hospital-Taipei, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China

Abstract

The style of a good academic journal can be easily recognized by the readers in several respects. Where the content is concerned, the topics of the articles and their literal expressions represent the characteristics of the journal. Besides, the layout, including the consistent typographical format and the unified structure, imparts a unique appearance. The same situations hold true for the Web version of the journal.

With very few exceptions, most serious medical journals request the contributing authors to conform to the uniform requirements for manuscripts. One of the popular requirements is organized construction in the approved manner. The regulation obviously aims at both maintaining a consistent format and facilitating subsequent processing. However, this feature can be utilized to automate the production of the journal's Web version.

Either with aid of optical character recognition software, or through file conversion, the text of an article is properly arranged paragraph by paragraph. A programming script (macro) is then written within a common commercial word processor (e.g. WordBasic in Microsoft Word 7.0 or Visual Basic for Applications in Microsoft Word 97). The program can automatically identify each section of the article by heading titles, e.g. Abstract, Introduction, Materials and Methods, which are seldom the beginning words of a sentence. Thereafter, all sections, including their headings and paragraphs, can be processed with addition of corresponding HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) tags by the computer. Another menu bar with several command buttons is created to supplement the functions of formatting the Web pages.

A user-friendly interface together with the added powerful ability of the word processor can make the production of Web pages more efficiently.

[Chin Med J (Taipei) 1998;61:S77.]