Jaap Akkerhuis

Introduction to the Office Document Architecture

The Office Document Architecture (ODA) [30] is designed to aid the representation and interchange of office documents such as memoranda, letters and reports. It provides comprehensive facilities for describing the structure and content of complex multi-media documents.

Experience Implementing ODA

We spent significant resources, in personnel and in time, on the CMU ODA Tool Kit, a portable subroutine library for application programs manipulating ODA documents. The tool kit effort involved specification, design, implementation, testing and distribution.

Initialization and Finalization

To allow proper access to any of the routines, variables or other identifiers exported by the tool kit, the application program must first initialize the tool kit. This is accomplished by calling the routine InitToolKit, described in section 14.1. The programmer is warned that the application program should not attempt to gain access to any of the tool kit facilities until this routine has been called and has returned successfully.

Using the Tool Kits

This chapter provides detailed information enabling a programmer to write application programs that make use of the CMU ODA Tool Kit and Raster Graphics Tool Kit. Section 12.1 explains how to make use of the include files provided by the tool kits. This is, of course, strictly a syntactic issue of putting the proper #include preprocessor statements in the appropriate places. The remaining sections of this chapter describe semantic issues. Section 12.2 describes the manner in which the routines exported by the tool kits should be used: how to call them and how to check for execution errors. Section 12.3 describes the global variables exported by the tool kits, the conditions under which these variables will contain meaningful information and what that information will be. Section 12.4 provides instructions for linking the appropriate tool kit libraries with application programs.

Document Models and Interchange Fidelity

This chapter provides a discussion of the document models and features we considered during the EXPRES project. We describe the structures of a document, the kinds of content a document contains, and the way in which formatting information is provided. We then examine how users edit a document, especially through the use of a style system. After examining each of these aspects of a document model, we consider briefly their impacts on document translation.

Introduction to the CMU ODA Tool Kit

This chapter presents an overview of the architecture of the CMU ODA Tool Kit. We have chosen to structure this discussion around an example application, that of document translation. We have used document translation because we designed the tool kit with this application in mind. This does not imply, however, that this is the only application for which the tool kit is suitable; layout and imaging are other obvious applications. Please note that the model of translation is illustrative only: we are not presenting a general discussion of document translation.

Experience using ODA

This chapter discusses our experiences using ODA as an interchange medium between document processing systems. Following the conventions in chapter 4, the EXPRES participants and their collaborators built a collection of translators between a variety of multi-media formats and ODA. The EXPRES participants, their collaborators and a group from the Technical University of Berlin connected their systems together and interchanged documents at several demonstrations. In this chapter, we discuss each of the participating systems and translators. We then discuss the scenarios presented at the demonstrations, including screen pictures showing the document as it was interchanged among systems. We close the chapter with an evaluation of the translation efforts: how well ODA served our purpose, how well the translators worked and what problems are intrinsic to the translation process.

Tool Kit Data Structures

This chapter describes the user-visible types defined by the Raster Graphics Tool Kit, in the first three sections. The raster formats supported by the tool kit are defined in the remainder of this chapter.

Raster Graphics Tool Kit Routines

This chapter describes the user-visible routines in the Raster Graphics Tool Kit. These routines can be classified broadly into five categories (described in the order in which they are presented): initialization and finalization routines (InitRGToolKit and FinalRGToolKit), creation and destruction routines (MakeRaster, ExtractRaster and DeleteRaster), assignment and access routines (AssignBit, AssignPel, GetBit, GetPel, InsertRaster, RasterPelFormat, RasterHeight and Raste rWidth), input and output routines (ReadMemRaster, ReadRaster, WriteMemRaster and WriteRaster) and miscellaneous routines (HoldRaster, ReleaseRaster and RasterStatus).

Affecting Run-time Behavior

This chapter describes the use of routines that can affect the run-time behavior of the tool kit. In particular, these routines can be used to ensure that designated data structures are kept in primary memory during the execution of certain time-critical sections of code; improve the efficiency of access to frequently-used attributes of some constituents.