The air is crisp and clear in autumn in Blacksburg. The trees that crawl up the mountainsides have a blue hue as frost crystalizes the blades of grass in our valley between.
Mallards pause at the campus pond for a breadcrumb and a chilly swim.
Meanwhile nearly five hundred graduate students are working all hours, preparing to graduate. Emily has performed her research and has her results. Emily learns that Adobe PDF is the published but proprietary successor to Adobe PostScript, designed especially for electronic publishing. She learns that it is reasonably simple to generate from regular word processors, using tools called Adobe PDFWriter and Adobe Distiller, and that it is easy to create hyperlinks with Adobe Exchange. She also learns that the Virginia Tech New Media Center can help her with the Adobe tools when she is ready to use them.