Technical section
Page description language INTERPRESS in electronic publishing environment

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Abstract

A page description language is a programming language used to describe the structure and appearance of a document page in a device (printer) independent way. A document description language is a language which is capable not only of specifying the structure and appearance of a page, but also the structure of a document, the global document composing environment, relationships between pages, the combination of pages of one document within another document, etc. The printing environment specification subset of a language is used to specify printing options, such as one- and two-sided printing, paper-shift during the printing of a page, and the tray to be used to feed in paper to print the entire document or on a page basis.

There are a number of objectives presented in this article. First, the concepts of page and document description are introduced, as well as printing environment specification languages. It then presents the structure and functionality of INTERPRESS, a document description language incorporating a printing environment specification subset from Xerox. It illustrates the use of INTERPRESS through an example in the Appendix. It also gives a brief history of page description languages, and it compares INTERPRESS to POSTSCRIPT. Finally, it describes the experience gained in two implementations related to INTERPRESS.

References (8)

  • INTERPRESS—Electronic Printing Standard, Xerox...
  • Font Interchange Standard, Xerox...
  • Raster Encoding Standard, Xerox...
  • ISO/DIS 7942—1982 Information Processing: Graphical Kernel System...
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At the time of preparation of this document the author was visiting researcher with IRISA. His regular associations are San Diego State University and Xerox, San Diego, CA.

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