Enriching scientific publications with interactive 3D PDF figures: A complete toolbox
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Radiology and Medical Imaging, Science and Medical Education
- Keywords
- Portable Document Format, 3D-PDF, PDF, U3D, Universal 3D, Application
- Copyright
- © 2015 Newe
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2015. Enriching scientific publications with interactive 3D PDF figures: A complete toolbox. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1594v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1594v1
Abstract
Three-dimensional (3D) data of many kinds is produced at an increasing rate throughout all scientific disciplines. The Portable Document Format (PDF) is the de-facto standard for the exchange of electronic documents and allows for embedding three-dimensional models. Therefore, it is a well suited medium for the visualization and the publication of this kind of data. The generation of the appropriate files has been cumbersome so far. This article presents the first release of a software toolbox which integrates the complete workflow for generating 3D model files and ready-to-publish 3D PDF documents for scholarly publications in a consolidated working environment. It can be used as a simple working tool or as a basis for specifically tailored solutions. It is available royalty-free and for Windows, MacOS and Linux.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ PrePrints in order to collect feedback. It is intended to be submitted for full peer review later. Attention: In contrast to the manuscript text, a binary version of the software is currently available only for Windows and not for MacOS or Linux. Mac users and Linux user still need to compile the source code themselves at this stage!
Supplemental Information
File S1. Example Figure
This PDF is an example which has been created with the described software.
File S2. Software Documentation
This archive contains the documentation of the described software in HTML format. It is also included in the Installer (File S3), but can be downloaded separately with this file.
File S3. MeVisLab Add-On Installer
This executable adds all necessary file to an existing installation of MeVisLab 2.7(.1) (Windows/Visual Studio 2013 x64).