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Document Interchange StandardsThis section of the OII Standards and Specifications List provides information on the following standards used to interchange formatted and unformatted documents:
Standards for document interchange are prepared by both private and public organizations. The following public bodies are active in this area:
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DSSSLExpanded nameDocument Style Semantics and Specification Language Area covered Sponsoring body and standard details
Characteristics/description Both parts of DSSSL are specified using a variant of the LISP list processing programming language called Scheme. DSSSL extends the basic IEEE-defined Scheme semantics by adding functions that can transform tree structures and provide the types of information about page dimensions, formatting rules, and language typically required by a text formatter. A DSSSL processor does not necessarily format a document. It can simply define the information that a proprietary formatter needs to know to process a structured document. A DSSSL formatting specification is an interchangeable piece of information that can be passed from formatter to formatter so that the same general rules for presenting the associated data can be used by each output device. In a fully standardized environment a structured document coded in SGML would have its formatting specifications written in DSSSL. These rules would be used by an application specific formatter to produce an SPDL output file that can be used to drive a printer. Usage (Market segment and penetration) Further details available from: To view the text submitted to ISO contact http://occam.sjf.novell.com:8080/dsssl/
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ECMA 262Expanded nameECMAScript: A general purpose, cross-platform programming language Area covered Sponsoring body and standard details
Characteristics/description An ECMAScript object is an unordered collection of properties each with zero or more attributes which determine how each property can be used. Properties are containers that hold other objects, primitive values, or methods. ECMAScript defines a collection of built-in object types, including Global objects, Object objects, Functions, Arrays, Strings, Booleans, Numbers, Math objects and Dates. There are, however, no provisions in the specification for input of external data or output of computed results. Instead the associated web browser will provide an ECMAScript host environment for client-side computation that includes objects that represent windows, menus, pop-ups, dialog boxes, text areas, anchors, frames, history, cookies, and input/output. Usage (Market segment and penetration) ECMAScript submitted to ISO/IEC JTC 1 for adoption under the fast-track procedure. ECMAScript specification has been adopted as the evaluation and function definition specification for the XML Style Language (XSL). Further details available from:
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HTMLExpanded name Areas covered Standard details
Characteristics/description HTML has been in use by the World Wide Web (WWW) global information initiative since 1990. Version 2.0 (RFC 1866) roughly corresponds to the capabilities of HTML in common use prior to June 1994. A draft for an extended version (4.0) of the HTML specification was released to the public on 8th July 1997 (revised 7th November 1997). The new draft includes facilities for multilingual data presentation, interactive elements and objects and control of presentation using cascading style sheets. ISO have drafted a standard that formalizes a set of HTML tags that are well supported for use in the creation of documents for which a stable distribution platform is required. Usage (Market segment and penetration) Further details available from:
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IPTC IIMExpanded nameInternational Press Telecommunications Council - Information Interchange Model Area covered Sponsoring body and standard details Characteristics/description Usage (Market segment and penetration) Further details available from: |
ODAExpanded nameOpen Document Architecture and Interchange Format Area covered Sponsoring bodies and standard details
Characteristics/description The key characteristics of a particular class of document are defined in a Document Application Profile (DAP), which are defined as part of an International Standards Profile (ISP). Three levels of ISP have currently been defined for simple document structures (with or without raster graphics), enhanced document structures and extended document structures. Usage (Market segment and penetration) Further details available from:
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OPIExpanded nameOpen Prepress Interface Area covered Sponsoring body and standard details Characteristics/description In a typical high-end scenario, the prepress customer takes original photographs to a colour prepress vendor before creating the publication in which the photographs will be placed. The prepress vendor creates two versions of each scanned image: a high-resolution version, which is stored on disk or tape, and a lower resolution colour Tag Image File Format (TIFF) version, which is sent to the customer. The prepress customer places the TIFF files into the publication, using DTP software to size, position, and crop the image as needed. OPI compatible software includes special PostScript language comments to specify each image's filename and positioning, as well as any size and cropping adjustments made by the customer. The prepress system will use these comments to plan the high-resolution images into the publication at the correct size and position. Usage (Market segment and penetration) Further details available from: For further details visit Adobe's website at http://www.adobe.com. |
Expanded name Area covered Sponsoring body and standard details
Characteristics/description Key features in PDF are a set of hot links, thumbnail icons of pages, chapter outlines and page annotations. The chapter outlines feature enables information to be added to a document, e.g. summaries, indexing information. Thumbnail icons of document pages facilitate fast browsing and random access. Page annotations act as electronic Post-Its and are user specific; they are not integrated with the document. PDF has a set of markers for these hyperfacilities, which can either be added to existing PostScript files or passed down from 'front-end' text-processing packages into the final PostScript. The conversion from PostScript to PDF can be carried out using software such as the Distiller program which is part of Adobe's Acrobat suite of software. Existing hyperfacility markers are converted during the conversion process. Alternatively, hyperfacility markers can be added manually from PDF viewers. A reverse process enables printable PostScript files to be recovered from PDF files. PDF viewers allow users to view distilled PDF pages on a chosen platform. Functionality of the viewer includes panning, zooming, scrolling, skipping pages and navigating around the document. Existing hyperfacility markers can be used to move from point to point and new markers can be inserted by each user as required. Usage (Market segment and penetration) Further details available from: For further details visit Adobe's website at http://www.adobe.com.
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PostScript (Levels 1, 2 and 3)Area coveredFormatted text files incorporating vector and raster graphics in a form suitable for processing on a compatible printer Sponsoring body and standard details A full specification can be obtained from PostScript Language Reference Manual 2nd edition, Addison Wesley Longman, December 1990, ISBN 0 201 18127-4 Characteristics/description
PostScript's most obvious language features are that it is a stack-based interpreted language which is heavily oriented toward graphics and typography. This design makes it useful as a device-independent page description language for imaging on raster devices. The language evolved from a printer control language into a communications medium on host computers. The PostScript imaging model has later content totally replacing earlier content pixel-by-pixel, which means that sophisticated operations, such as image merge, cannot be expressed in standard PostScript alone. The Standard Page Description Language (SPDL) extends Level 2 functionality by adding document production attributes. Usage (Market segment and penetration) Further details available from: For further information contact Adobe's website at http://www.adobe.com. |
RTFExpanded nameRich Text Format Area covered Sponsoring body and standard details Characteristics/description Before a file is converted into RTF any macros used to create the file must be expanded. For example, the names of styles used to create a Word document are not transmitted, only the lower-level formatting changes that resulted from the application of each style. Images are converted from their binary form into a sequence of digits and letters, each character representing the value of 16 bits of the binary image. Attributes about the form and content of the image can be attached to the image using a generalized object representation. Usage (Market segment and penetration) Most word processors and desktop publishing systems provide an option that allows their documents to be converted to RTF. However, as Microsoft update the RTF specification each time they release a new level of software there is no guarantee that a new format of RTF file can be read by any other word processing program. It should be noted that any function of a word processor that cannot be expressed in RTF will be lost during the conversion process. Further details available from: Limited details of the RTF specification are provided in Microsoft's Word for Windows Technical Reference manual, which must be obtained direct from Microsoft. |
SGMLExpanded nameStandard Generalized Markup Language Area covered Sponsoring body and standard details
Characteristics/description Each SGML document starts with a Document Type Definition (DTD) or a pointer to an externally stored DTD. Externally stored files, which can contain either SGML coded data or non-SGML data (coded in a declaared notation) can be referenced using public identifiers that can conform to the rules for Public Text Object Identifiers specified in ISO/IEC 9070. SGML is a language for coding hierarchical structures and so can be used to mark up hierarchically structured data of the type typically found in books. It is also possible to use SGML to recode the grammar of other heirarchically structured data sets CGM. Advantages to such an approach include:
Usage (Market segment and penetration) Further details available from: Details of current JTC1/WG4 work, and resources related to their standards, can be obtained online fromhttp://www.ornl.gov/sgml/WG8/home.htm. A World Wide Web server providing up-to-date information on SGML is provided by the OpenSGML vendor's consortium at www.sgmlopen.org/sgml/.
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SPDLExpanded nameStandard Page Description Language Area covered Sponsoring body and standard details
Characteristics/description Usage (Market segment and penetration) Further details available from: Further details can be obtained online from http://www.ornl.gov/sgml/WG8/home.htm. This database includes pointers to software for validating and processing SPDL files. |
TEIExpanded nameText Encoding Initiative Area covered Sponsoring body and standard details Characteristics/description Because of its emphasis on research applications, the TEI DTD is highly modular and extensible. The DTD is also unusual in its concern for bibliographic information. All TEI documents include a header which identifies the work and gives details of its source, as well as documenting the encoding and editorial practices applied. Basic tag sets are provided for prose, poetry, drama, speech, dictionaries and terminological databases, and a method has been defined for creating customised mixes from these basic sets. Additional tag sets are provided to capture information related to linking, analysis (including feature structure analysis), certainty, transcriptions, critiques, names and dates, nets (graphs, digraphs, trees, etc), figures and corpora. Additional tags can also be defined for use by individual research projects. Auxiliary tagsets are provided for the definition of the TEI writing system, and for feature and tagset declarations. The first of these allows for the detailed documentation of any user-defined transliteration scheme used within a document; the second provides formal definitions of any feature structure annotation provided; the last defines a scheme for the production of SGML-based technical documentation. Usage (Market segment and penetration) Further details available from: |
TeX DVIExpanded nameTeX Device Independent File Format Area covered Sponsoring body and standard details Characteristics/description The TeX primitives provide a very powerful set of typesetting controls. They are, however, difficult to use in their raw form as they form a fully-fledged programming language, which includes facilities for defining your own character shapes. As TeX also provides powerful facilities for compiling structured sets of macros most users generate documents that are coded using TeX macro sets, of which LaTeX is by far the most popular. Work is currently underway to extend LaTeX to provide the type of facilities typically provided through SGML and HyTime. The SIMSIM TeX macro package can be used to convert SGML documents into TeX format. Usage (Market segment and penetration) Further details available from: AMS maintain a WWW page that points to a wide range of TeX resources at http://www.ams.org/tex. |
XMLExpanded nameThe eXtensible Markup Language Area covered Sponsoring body and standard details Characteristics/description Usage (Market segment and penetration) Further details available from:
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Vendor-specific Page Description FormatsArea covered Sponsoring body and standard details Characteristics/description GQ Epson's page description language PCL Hewlett-Packard's Printer Control Language Usage (Market segment and penetration) Further details available from: |
This information set on OII standards is maintained by Martin Bryan of The SGML Centre and Man-Sze Li of IC Focus on behalf of European Commission DGXIII/E. File last updated: January 1998 |