Filtering:
Multifaceted Views of a Single Document


My publication list consists of multiple pages, in which different selections of papers are available depending on topic or other criteria. Several of my papers combine ideas from different topics and are available on multiple pages. I also use a similar sort of filtering in The Geometry Junkyard and Geometry in Action. Here's how I do it.

The idea is simple: a common file, pubs.ff, contains descriptions of all the papers. This file is essentially an HTML file, but with extra lines added to control a program I wrote, filter.c. This program copies lines from pubs.ff one at a time. The control lines tell filter.c to turn on or off copying based on keywords passed as arguments to the program. By putting the appropriate control lines in pubs.ff, the same publication list can be given many different appearances.

Eventually I hope to do this filtering automatically, as pages are requested, via the CGI interface to the WWW. However until some security questions are resolved, I am currently using a shell script to generate separate files for each view of my publication list.

Advantages of this method include:


Downloadable software by David Eppstein, ICS, UC Irvine
Last update: