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
- © 2016 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
- 2016. Enriching scientific publications with interactive 3D PDF figures: A complete toolbox. PeerJ PrePrints 4:e1594v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1594v2
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 out-of-the-box as a simple working tool or as a basis for specifically tailored solutions. A comprehensive documentation, an example project and a project wizard facilitate the customization. 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. New features in this version: 1) added project wizard for tailored PDF modules; 2) installers for MacOS and Linux (Ubuntu 14.04) are now available as well; 3) all installers are now provided via Zenodo (no longer as supplemental files); 4) software manual is now available as PDF (supplemental file 2).
Supplemental Information
File S1. Example Figure
This PDF is an example which has been created with the described software.
File S2. Software Manual
This PDF describes how to use the software. A HTML version of this documentation is also included in the installers and can be viewed directly inside MeVisLab.
