Introduction

Document preparation systems might be now the most commonly used computer systems, ranging from stand-alone text processing individual machines to highly sophisticated systems running on mainframe computers. All of those systems internally use a more or less formal system for representing documents. Document representation formalisms are very different according to their goals. Some of them define the interface with the printing device, they are oriented towards a precise geometric description of the contents of each page in a document. Others are used internally in systems as a memory representation. Yet others have to be learned by users ; they are symbolic languages used to control document processing.

The trouble is that there are today nearly as many representation formalisms as document preparation systems. This makes it nearly impossible, first to interchange documents among heterogeneous systems, second to have standard programming interfaces for developping systems. Standardization organizations and large companies are now trying to establish standards in the field in order to stop proliferation of formalisms and facilitate document interchange.

This paper focuses in the last sections on three document representation formalisms often called ‘revisable formats’, namely SGML [SGML], ODA [ODA], and Interscript [Ayers & al.], [Joloboff & al.]. In order to better understand what is a revisable format, the paper starts with a look at the evolution of the architecture of document preparation systems.

Introduction

Increasing numbers of people are using computers for the preparation of documents. Many of these new computer users are not “computer types”; they have a problem (to produce a neatly formatted document), they know the computer can help them, and they want the result with a minimum of (perceived) fuss and bother. The terms in which they present the problem to the computer should be “theirs” – easy for them to use and understand and based on previous document experience.

Many powerful document preparation tools exist that are capable of producing high quality output. However, they are often awkward (some would say difficult) to use, especially for the novice or casual user, and a substantial amount of training is usually necessary before they can be used intelligently.

This paper presents the design of a document preparation system that allows users to make use of existing formatters and yet makes document entry relatively easy. The following topics are discussed:

• the requirements and overall design for such a system, and

• some of the issues to be resolved in constructing the system.

First, some terminology is clarified.

Terms and Concepts

We use Shaw's model for documents [Shaw80, Puruta82, Kimura84]. A document is viewed as a hierarchy of objects, where each object is an instance of a class that defines the possible components and other attributes of its instances. Typical (low level) classes are document components such as sections, paragraphs, headings, footnotes, figures, and tables.

For many years text preparation and document manipulation have been poor relations in the computing world, and it is only recently that they have taken their rightful place in the mainstream of computer research and development. Everyone has their own favourite reason for this change: word processors, workstations with graphics screens, nonimpact printers, or authors preparing their own manuscripts.

Whatever the reason, people in computing have suddenly found themselves using the same equipment and fighting the same problems as those in printing and publishing. It would be nice to say that we are all working happily together, but there are still plenty of disputes (which is healthy) and plenty of indifference (which is not). There is no doubt, however, that this coming together of different disciplines has brought new life and enthusiasm with it.

The international conference on Text Processing and Document Manipulation at Nottingham, is not the first conference to focus on this field of computing. It follows in the footsteps of Research and Trends in Document Preparation Systems at Lausanne in 1981, the Symposium on Text Manipulation at Portland in 1981, La Manipulation de Documents at Rennes in 1983, and the recent PROTEXT conferences in Dublin. We hope, however, that it marks the beginning of a regular series of international conferences that will bring top researchers and practitioners together to exchange ideas and share their enthusiasm with a wide audience.

As the papers for this conference started to come in, a number of themes began to emerge. The dominant theme (in number of papers) was document structures for interactive editing.

Wonderful Appearance–Wretched Content

With the advent of relatively inexpensive laser printers, computer output is being routinely typeset. It can be expected that there will be a revolution in the way business and technical documents are created, based on the use of low-cost typesetters. Easy typesetting and graphics is an extension of word-processing capability, which is already widespread. The essential feature of word processing is its ability to quickly reproduce a changed document with mechanical perfection. However, as the appearance improves, the quality of writing seems to fall in proportion. These forces are probably at work: (1) More people can (attempt to) write using better technology, and because writing is hard, novices often produce poor work. (2) With improved technology, projects are attempted that were previously avoided; now they are done, badly. These factors are familiar from programming, and suggest an analogy between creating a document and developing a program. The current word-processing situation corresponds to the undisciplined use of programming languages that preceded so-called “modern programming practices.”

Introduction

W is an interactive text-editor and document preparation facility being developed within the department of Computer Science at Manitoba. A working prototype of W, known as W-p, has been described elsewhere [King84]. W is a considerable development of that earlier system, but retains the same basic philosophy:

• W is an interactive, extensible, integrated editor and formatter;

• W adheres as closely as possible to the “what you see is what you get” (wysiwyg) philosophy;

• W encompasses a wide range of document items, incuding text, tables, mathematical formulae, and provision for general graphical items;

• W is portable and adaptable; that is, several versions of W are being produced to run on different architectures; although the user interface will differ in its detail, the underlying system will be common;

• W is user extensible in a variety of ways.

The remainder of this paper is organised as follows. Section 2 describes W from the user's viewpoint and gives some details of its implementation. For the most part, it is a review of material which is covered in greater depth in [King84].

Introduction

There is no doubt that ‘electronic publishing’ and other computer based tools for the production and dissemination of printed material open up new horizons for efficient communication. The problems currently faced by the designers of such systems are enormous. One problem area is the identification of duplicate material especially when there is more than one source generating similar documents. Abstracting is a good example here. Another problem area is the linkage between full text and bibliographic databases.

As part of its attempt to establish collaboration between different countries, the European Economic Community initiated the DOCDEL programme of research and a series of studies such as DOCOLSYS which investigate the present situation in Europe regarding document identification, location and ordering with particular reference to electronic ordering and delivery of documents.

The majority of DOCDEL systems likely to be developed fall under one of the following areas:

1. (a) Delivery from computer-based systems

2. (b) Delivery from non-computer based systems

3. (c) Electronic publishing

4. (d) On-demand publishing

How people read books

Books are rarely read completely linearly; mystery novels almost are, but how many people let their curiosity get the better of them and sneak a look at the last page to see who dunnit?. A text book is more likely to be dipped-into looking for a particular section, and a journal article tends to be read in full only if the reader considers it useful and relevant after having read the title, then the abstract, conclusion and finally the references [Maude85, Line82].

Page Description Languages

An imaging device, such as a typesetter, laser printer, or display, must have some way of knowing what image it is being asked to show. The two traditional means of providing it with that information have been to describe the image to the imager in terms of a bitmap or character map or describe the image to the imager by means of a sequence of control commands to the imager's electronics.

The bit-map or character-map schemes are the simplest and oldest. For example a line printer is provided with a character map (in this spot put the character in this spot put the character and so forth).

Introduction

This paper deals with a recently completed project to develop a publishing system which provides users with responsive methods for the collection of information, and flexible ways for producing different publications.

It concerns a major supplier of replacement car parts which uses a range of publications to enable dealers and individuals to identify parts to fit cars. While it is obviously a specialised application, it represents an important market sector and also demonstrates a number of issues concerning the structuring of data and passing control directly to the users.

Context

Unipart is the largest supplier in Europe of replacement car parts and accessories for all makes of cars. It has been a leader in the development of systems for the distribution of product information, and has been using computerised publication systems for a number of years. As an indication of scale, it provides 12,000 parts for 3,500 vehicles and produces 135 major publications.

Introduction

The BIOSTATION is a generalized document preparation system, developed for the CRBM** and in use since May 85, able to guide an interactive editing of biological sequences by taking into account their semantics. This semantic is extracted at editing time from the document itself by an integrated expert system, and is used to express the structuration. This paper also focusses on the use of a document preparation system as the mediator for a larger application.

Genetic sequences are observed in this approach as generalized documents. This choice allows to associate convenient, and so more legible, visual representations to the abstract aspects of biological sequences semantic.

At first, we explain how semantic information on the sequences is obtained and used to guide editing. The biostation architecture is presented in a second section.

Problem position

The genetic information which allows organic cells to synthesize proteins is kept in genes. These genes are linear strings built with four types of molecules (Adenin, Thymin, Guanin, Cytosin) called nucleotids. The non biologist readers can refer to [Hélène 84]. The studied length of such strings can be up to 30000 atoms.

A gene can be analysed by the biologists to explicit its formula as a word on (A, T, G, C), and operations can be done on the gene (in vitro or in vivo) to modify it by insertions or deletions of some parts, at precise positions.

Introduction

This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the typographic issues for laying out information within a two-dimensional table. Tables are a concentrated form of the more general layout problem; one can find table formatting analogies in both the larger-scale problem of page makeup, and the smaller-scale problem of aligning notation within a mathematical equation.

Few table formatting tools have addressed all the issues raised by this paper. In fact, it was a challenge to identify the various issues that typographers, compositors, and graphic designers have managed with great skill through the traditional graphic arts processes. Thus this paper provides a checklist for the designs and implementations of new table formatting tools, algorithms, and structures.

Introduction

Advances in hardware technology are unlikely to keep pace with the increasing growth of on-line document storage. In an environment where the trend is towards local and wide area networks (there is the promise of an interconnected society around the corner), a large number of documents would be transmitted between nodes. Document storage, their communication along network paths and between peripherals and processors requires, for the provision of a satisfactory service at reasonable cost, that the documents be held more compactly than at present. Natural language being highly redundant a suitable encoding scheme could be utilized with any resultant compression reducing both storage and communication cost. In an online environment the compression and decompression schemes must not involve excessive overheads in either time or space; since the documents would need to be compressed only once for storage while decompressed (or retrieved) more often, it is possible to tolerate higher levels of overhead during the compression stage.

Document retrieval requires fast string search capabilities, and it is usual to provide additional access paths to reduce the search times e.g. by providing inverted lists on words. In [Goyal83] a scheme was proposed that made use of inverted indexes associated with compressed documents.

Introduction

Writing good documentation is hard. Hardest of all, perhaps, is to write good user manuals for computer software. The reason why this is so difficult is that there is a great diversity of possible readers, and of modes of perusal. Readers will range from the naive to the expert, and in between there are important special cases of readers with expertise in a related area, such as a FORTRAN expert learning BASIC. Furthermore readers, whatever their background, will want to peruse the user manual in different ways at different stages in their learning process. Early on they will want summaries and tutorial information; later they may want to browse; finally they will want a reference manual. In order to cover this spectrum properly you need a huge range of user manuals. In a few spheres this range exists: there is, for example, a big range of manuals – mostly books – on Pascal and many of these are aimed at specific niches in the market of possible readers.

Motivation and Goals of the Research

The world of text formatters can be divided into two parts. In one group are the pure formatters, which convert a document description, prepared by a separate editing system, into a formatted document suitable for display on an appropriate hardware device. In the other group are the Integrated Editor/Formatters, which merge the editing and the formatting functions into one unified, interactive system-documents are created, viewed, and revised without leaving the edit or/formatter.

Introduction

Advances in computer technology have brought many new methods of conducting research in typesetting and typography. One area which benefits a lot from the use of modern computers is related to type-font design and evluation. With the aid of a computerized optical scanner, characters in different font styles can be read and converted into digital images. Once these images have been binarized [Suen 1986], they can be stored in matrices and reproduced easily by computers and matrix and laser printers. Hence it is not surprising to see that digital fonts have become more and more widely used in the computer environment. While these binary matrices can be stored and used later for printing, they form a new tool to study several subjects in typography such as legibility of font styles, reading speed/comprehension and font style, spacing of words and texts on the page, line lengths and character sizes. These topics have been of great interest to many psychologists and others (see e.g. Burt 1959, Tinker 1963, Hartley et al 1983). Using modern equipment, these topics can be studied much more rigorously and efficiently than before due to the fact that many parameters such as font styles, character shapes, exposure time, presentation speed, format and spacing, etc.