This volume contains the results of the EXPRES project which dealt with the interchange of electronic multimedia documents among heterogeneous systems. The book consists of two major parts, a nontechnical one dealing with various aspects of multimedia document interchange using ODA as the intermediate representation platform for document description and the translation of different document formats to and from ODA for diverse document production systems — always keeping multi-media documents processable among these systems —, while the second, technical one describes two software tool kits for handling textual documents and raster images in the EMPRES project framework. The first part of the book introduces the ODA (Office Document Architecture) standard, discusses the EXPRES document model and document translation strategy with emphasis on the details of the interchange conventions underlying the EXPRES approach, and contains the experience gained in using ODA as an intermediate representation for document translation. It includes brief descriptions of the document production systems for which translators were written (Andrew Toolkit, Diamond, Interleaf, and troff), the document features that were translated and demonstrations of document translations. This is followed by a discussion of some problems faced in performing high-fidelity document translation and using ODA in this context. Finally, conclusions are formulated covering the EXPRES interchange requirements, multimedia document interchange based on an intermediary language and the provision of translators, the Office Document Architecture, the two tool kits that were constructed and the implementation strategies for the took kits and the translators. The other major part of the book consists of the application programmer’s interface reference manual for the CMU ODA Tool Kit, for manipulating plain textual documents, and the Raster Graphics Tool Kit, for handling bit-mapped graphics images in a variety of popular formats (e.g., Amiga IFF, Andrew Raster, CompuServe GIF, MacPaint, ODA Bitmap Encoding Scheme, Postscript Output, Sun Raster, X Bitmap). This includes the description of the tool kits’ data structures, ODA constituents and attributes, user- visible types and routines manipulating attributes, etc. Several appendices contain further reference material intended for the programmer using one of the tool kits (annotated example programs, installation instructions for several machine types and operating systems, descriptions of known restrictions and bugs, etc.).
U.Hahn (Freiburg i.Br.)