AIAA SF Newsletters

The newsletter, known as the AIAA San Francisco Section In4m-Letter is published bi-monthly in print and on-line forms.

Current Issue

This is the latest issue, in color and on-line.

Distribution Media

The newsletter is published in several forms. In some cases, the difference between them may be subtle. The following is an explanation of the differences, giving why you might want one form instead of another.

Screen PDF - This is designed for fast download and viewing with a PDF (Portable Document format) viewer such as Adobe Acrobat 3 Reader or Mac OS X Previewer. Typically, text rendering depends on whatever the host system provides. In the case of Acrobat 3, a set of default fonts is provided when certain styles of fonts are not provided in the document. If you are using a telephone dial-up modem and only want to view on-line, this is a good form to select.

Some PDF documents (not our newsletter, of course) use slightly unusual fonts and are produced as screen PDF. You may see words overlapping as the viewer attempts to approximate the intent the document creator's intent.

Print PDF - Although these PDF files can readily be viewed on-line, they can be considerably larger than the screen PDF variety. The fonts specified for use by the document are typically embedded into the document itself. The quality of print or viewing is more true to the original, although downloading may take somewhat longer to complete. It requires a viewer such as Acrobat 4 Reader or Mac OS X Previewer. This form is good for laser printers and inkjet printers using resolutions up to 600 dots per inch.
Note: Due to recent production difficulties, recent issues of the newsletter do not have embedded fonts.

Press PDF - We don't normally make press PDF files available for general use. They are very large. These are intended as the electronic form for creating master images for printing presses. These masters generally have resolutions ranging from 1800 to 2400 dots per inch. The mass-mailed newsletter is usually composed of the first two and last two pages of the press PDF.

Master images from press PDF generally very sharp, but typically requires very high quality paper or film to attain this. During the printing process, a lot of the image sharpness is lost, but results are still much better than if the master were captured from printed output of a laser printer.

HTML - We have done some work with automatic conversion to HTML. A few newsletter issues are available in this form. The advantage, of course, is that no special viewer is required. However, so far, every HTML version we've generated has required some manual editing after it was automatically produced.

So far, newsletter issues have ended up as single HTML files. This open keeps the browser busy until the last part of the newsletter is finally fetched. We know there has to be a better way, but we haven't got it all figured out yet.

Back Issues

Volume XLVII - July 2005 to June 2006

Volume XLVI - July 2004 to June 2005

Volume XLV - July 2003 to June 2004

Volume XLIV - July 2002 to June 2003

Volume XLIII - July 2001 to June 2002

Volume XLII - July 2000 to June 2001

Volume XLI - July 1999 to August 2000