Enhancing composite digital documents using XML-based standoff markup

Document representations can rapidly become unwieldy if they try to encapsulate all possible document properties, ranging tract structure to detailed rendering and layout. We present a composite document approach wherein an XMLbased document representation is linked via a ‘shadow tree’ of bi-directional pointers to a PDF representation of the same document. Using a two-window viewer any material selected in the PDF can be related back to the corresponding material in the XML, and vice versa. In this way the treatment of specialist material such as mathematics, music or chemistry (e.g. via ‘read aloud’ or ‘play aloud’) can be activated via standard tools working within the XML representation, rather than requiring that application-specific structures be embedded in the PDF itself. The problems of textual recognition and tree pattern matching between the two representations are discussed in detail. Comparisons are drawn between our use of a shadow tree of pointers to map bet...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: DOCENG
• Authors: Peter L. Thomas, David F. Brailsford
• Keywords: Composite Document Approach, Composite Documents, DOCENG 2005, Document Analysis, Document Representations