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Electronic Proposal Submission Update (1Jun95) (from KPNO, NOAO Newsletter No. 42, June 1995) The third round of electronic proposal submission for Kitt Peak went smoothly. We received 245 proposals, of which 210 (86%) were submitted electronically. This represents an increase in both the total number and fraction of electronic submissions over previous semesters. By comparison, 232 proposals were submitted last semester (78% electronically), and 231 proposals the previous semester, of which 73% were submitted electronically. There were 139 figures submitted via e-mail for 92 proposals. The process now seems to work fairly painlessly for both the community and ourselves, so no major changes are envisioned in the future. There were the usual handful of problems, most of which were handled by David Bell. 1) People did not actually check the proposal by running LaTeX on it and printing it out. This was by far the most common problem. We then had to fix whatever minor typos that prevented printing. A new problem that caught our attention this time was that three proposals had no table giving the requested telescope/instrument combination---two "obsrun" blocks had been deleted, causing the table to collapse. 2) A few people running LaTeX2e had problems that caused the title to appear as "OT1" regardless of what they put in the title field. We're investigating a cure. The proposals printed correctly on this end. 3) Three proposals (and one figure) were submitted with lines that were too long for the mailer to handle. We caught these and had the proposers resubmit. 4) One person submitted the PostScript version of the proposal. It was flagged as a figure, and correspondence then ensued. The proposal was resubmitted. Another person submitted a "uuencoded" file ("attached" the file in mailtool), and had to be contacted to resubmit. 5) The most serious problem occurred Friday at 1700 when someone submitted a 13 Mb figure---we thought we had ample diskspace at the time, but multiple copies created for backup caused the disk to fill. We're buying a larger disk! 6) A few figures and/or WIYN queue forms were misplaced when people submitting them mistyped the "subject" line on their submission. 7) The e-mail address for submitting thesis letters from advisors had a typo in the instructions. This has now been corrected. The correct address is kpnoprop-submit@noao.edu. 8) Several people added comments to the beginning of the proposal submission. This caused manual intervention to an otherwise automated process. Comments are best sent separately to kpnoprop-help@noao.edu, since the actual LaTeX file is generally not read by anyone. If you have any comments for improvements or making the submission process smoother, please send e-mail to pmassey@noao.edu. Phil Massey, Jeannette Barnes, David Bell, Pat Patterson, Judy Prosser, Marlene Saltzman
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