Use of personal computers for translation and publication of an anesthesia textbook

We used personal computers extensively for translating and publishing in Japanese an anesthesia textbook originally written in English. The procedure included optical character recognition, scanning of figures, use of computer translation, use of electronic mail and computer type-setting. While these have individually been done previously, this is process of any medical textbook published in Japanese. The advantages of combining these technologies are good exchange of information among individual authors/translators, rapid translation process, preliminary visualization of the final product, and overall high quality of the published book.