The development of the presentation and the features incorporated in the electronic version has been accomplished by the AAS electronic publishing team over the course of the last two years. Two full scale demonstrations of sample issues were made at AAS meetings and the feedback from scientists, both at these meetings and over the WWW have been instrumental in the choice of features, presentation schemes and navigational tools. The first production version of the Electronic ApJ Letters has been received favorably by the community, and a new version is due in January 1996. Aside from the inclusion of all complex math and figures, there are several features which, to the best of our knowledge, first appeared in the AAS journal demonstrations and which set this journal apart from other Internet journals. The individual articles are rendered on screen using HTML, formatted for easy browsing with the complex math represented via GIF images of the characters and symbols.
Maximum use is made of the native fonts to reduce the net transfer time.
The journal includes a number of novel and effective navigation tools to aid the reader. It is possible to bring up the figures page, select an interesting figure and jump directly into the relevant text in the body of the paper. The same can be done from the reference page. Local printout of individual articles can be done using Adobe Acrobat. Our streamlined production schedule for the electronic version allows articles to appear on the WWW one month ahead of the issue date for the paper version.