Previous Article
Next Article
Table of Contents

CTIO Observing Requests: February - July 1995 (1Dec94)
(from CTIO, NOAO Newsletter No. 40, 1 December 1994)

This semester represented our first use of the new LaTeX proposal form; we
have been using the older TeX form for electronic submission for a few
years, but the new form makes electronic submission of figures possible. We
ended up with 171 proposals, somewhat lower than usual (see statistics
below). Of these, 82% came in by e-mail. The proportion is even higher if
one eliminates local staff proposals, since most of these were not submitted
electronically. A few of the electronic submissions were using the old TeX
form, but most used the new form and procedures and roughly a third of
these included figures. Some of the proposals were clearly prepared with
considerable care and effort and, whatever their content, look very nice.
Almost exactly half of the proposals arrived on the last day (30 September),
and about half of these arrived between 5 pm and midnight (about one
proposal every nine minutes during the last twelve hours, corresponding to
about 2% of our satellite link capacity)!

With only one exception, we were able to print out the proposals on the
default printer (Sun Sparcprinter). The one recalcitrant proposal printed out
on an Apple Laserwriter. A number of the proposals required tinkering to
process correctly (roughly 10%). The problems mainly fell into three
categories:

o   Recognizing Postscript figures. The processor looks for certain keywords
    in the figure headers in order to identify them as such, and not all
    programs produce these keywords. (Lick Mongo in particular). This can
    be solved with better instructions and a bit more sophistication in the
    processor.

o   Mistakes in following instructions. A few people misunderstood
    instructions, misread their proposal ID number, or even forgot what they
    had called the figure file in the LaTeX file.

o   Proofreading. We got a couple of proposals where the proposer clearly
    made one last change and never LaTeXed it, because these proposals
    had extra or missing delimiters or other basic errors. Other people
    clearly edited the sample file, not the template, and left in some of the
    sample text, or had overlapping text: in all these cases they clearly did
    not print out and carefully read the proposal.

                     Lessons and Instructions for the Future

First of all, as stated previously, we will no longer accept the old TeX form,
either by regular mail or by electronic mail. As a reminder, if you've lost
your copy of the previous Newsletter, you can get the new forms by sending
an e-mail to ctioprop-request@noao.edu, or by anonymous ftp from
ctio.noao.edu. The e-mail request doesn't require any particular subject or
content lines.

Second, if you do send your proposal in by mail, make sure you send a
second copy to Tucson. If you send the proposal in by courier, send the
Tucson copy by similar means. Also, if you send the proposal by courier do
not (that's do not) send it to the post-office box address in La Serena; use
our Santiago address (given in the proposal instructions) instead. This is
because none of the international courier services deliver directly to La
Serena, and therefore hand off your proposal to a local courier service--and
these in turn cannot deliver to a post-office box, and don't always know
what to do with the letter, resulting in delays.

Second, print out the final version of your proposal. That one last change
you made may not have done what you thought it would.

Third, follow the instructions. We will have cleaned up the ambiguities
discovered on this round, but mostly they can be resolved by reading
carefully.

Jay Elias, Ximena Herreros

Previous Article
Next Article
Table of Contents