David J. Bell, Jeannette Barnes, Caty Pilachowski (NOAO)
An automated system for receiving and processing observing proposal forms has been in use at NOAO for the past five years. Investigators fill in a LaTeX template proposal either directly or through a WWW interface and send the completed form, optionally with associated PostScript figures, to NOAO. A procmail front-end sorts the incoming messages and processes them with Perl scripts. Several enhancements have been added to increase automation, accuracy, and efficiency as required for a system that now handles several hundred documents arriving over the course of a few days. New features include: automatic verification and printing of documents as they arrive, a Web page that allows investigators to track the status of their proposals, and a searchable database that records proposal and processing information.