This is it - the final version of my dissertation. It was completed, signed off, and turned in on 19 June 1997. This HTML version is mostly complete as far as the text but the images need a bit of work.
I wrote the whole thing using Corel WordPerfect 7.0 which has a nifty "Publish to HTML" feature. However it has a bit of trouble with wanting to left justify images and allow text to flow around them and it can't quite do all the Greek characters. I was able to fix the images problem and to get Greek characters I am taking advantage of the <font face=symbol> tag. However, if your system does not have a font named "symbol" these characters will look like regular letters, but the general ideas will, I hope, come across.
Another difficulty with trying to publish a scientific work on the WWW is that not all the characters necessary are quite there yet. HTML 3.0 has a <math> specification but none of the major browsers support it. Therefore I have had to change some of the characters which does change the meaning of the text, but only in a minor way. The two major changes were that the "about equal to" sign (wavey equal sign) was changed into a "~" in a couple places and at least once the "less-than-or-equal-to" sign was substituted with a "<". Not a big deal, but enough to make me want to see the <math> specifications implemented - enough with this bandwidth-hogging multi-media already!
Images here are quite poor quality. In my original work the images were created as GIF images. These images, when imported into WP7.0 were converted into bitmap images which actually print and display quite well. However in the conversion to HTML these bitmapped images are re-converted into GIF images. This multiple conversion process was not kind to the images. I will eventually get around to placing the original GIF images here - or maybe JPEG equivalents to conserve bandwidth. A task for another day.
Finally, the plots from the PCA technique (PCA is well explained in the dissertation, have no fear) were created in PostScript format. These were imported into my document, and since I printed it on a PostScript printer there was no problem. However, the converter (and in fact the WP7.0 display) cannot interpret PostScript and so these show up as links to the PostScript plots. If you don't have a PostScript viewer (for Win95) you can get simple, easy to use instructions at the GhostScript and Ghostview page. More detailed information, and viewers for other operating systems, can be found at the official GhostView site.
So, without further ado, on to my dissertation.
Comments? Questions? Mail me at: klassen@rowan.edu