Creating Structured PDF Files Using XML Templates

This paper describes a tool for recombining the logical structure from an XML document with the typeset appearance of the corresponding PDF document. The tool uses the XML representation as a template for the insertion of the logical structure into the existing PDF document, thereby creating a Structured/Tagged PDF. The addition of logical structure adds value to the PDF in three ways: the accessibility is improved (PDF screen readers for visually impaired users perform better), media options are enhanced (the ability to reflow PDF documents, using structure as a guide, makes PDF viable for use on hand-held devices) and the re-usability of the PDF documents benefits greatly from the presence of an XML-like structure tree to guide the process of text retrieval in reading order (e.g. when interfacing to XML applications and databases)

Research Articles in Simplified HTML: a Web-first format for HTML-based scholarly articles

Purpose. This paper introduces the Research Articles in Simplified HTML (or RASH), which is a Web-first format for writing HTML-based scholarly papers; it is accompanied by the RASH Framework, a set of tools for interacting with RASH-based articles. The paper also presents an evaluation that involved authors and reviewers of RASH articles submitted to the SAVE-SD 2015 and SAVE-SD 2016 workshops. Design. RASH has been developed aiming to: be easy to learn and use; share scholarly documents (and embedded semantic annotations) through the Web; support its adoption within the existing publishing workflow. Findings. The evaluation study confirmed that RASH is ready to be adopted in workshops, conferences, and journals and can be quickly learnt by researchers who are familiar with HTML. Research Limitations. The evaluation study also highlighted some issues in the adoption of RASH, and in general of HTML formats, especially by less technically savvy users. Moreover, additional tools are needed, e.g., for enabling additional conversions from/to existing formats such as OpenXML. Practical Implications. RASH (and its Framework) is another step towards enabling the definition of formal representations of the meaning of the content of an article, facilitating its automatic discovery, enabling its linking to semantically related articles, providing access to data within the article in actionable form, and allowing integration of data between papers. Social Implications. RASH addresses the intrinsic needs related to the various users of a scholarly article: researchers (focussing on its content), readers (experiencing new ways for browsing it), citizen scientists (reusing available data formally defined within it through semantic annotations), publishers (using the advantages of new technologies as envisioned by the Semantic Publishing movement). Value. RASH helps authors to focus on the organisation of their texts, supports them in the task of semantically enriching the content of articles, and leaves all the issues about validation, visualisation, conversion, and semantic data extraction to the various tools developed within its Framework

Preservation of Word-Processing Documents

Word processing documents are a major problem for digital repositories. As I will explain below, they are not suitable for long-term storage, so they need to be converted into an archival format for preservation. In this report I will address the following questions: • What file formats are suitable for long-term storage of word processed text documents?; and • How can we convert documents into a suitable archival format? I also address the related non-technical question: • How can we get authors to convert and deposit their work? While the vast majority of material generated by universities is text, most research on digital preservation concentrates on images, sound recordings, video and multimedia. You could be forgiven for thinking that this is because text is simple, but unfortunately that’s not so. Even relatively short text documents (like this one) have complex structure consisting of sections (parts, chapters, subsections etc) and also of indented structures like lists and blockquotes. A significant part of the meaning is lost if that structure is ignored (for example by saving as plain text)

Mapping and Displaying Structural Transformations between XML and PDF

Documents are often marked up in XML-based tagsets to delineate major structural components such as headings, paragraphs, figure captions and so on, without much regard to their eventual displayed appearance. And yet these same abstract documents, after many transformations and 'typesetting' processes, often emerge in the popular format of Adobe PDF, either for dissemination or archiving. Until recently PDF has been a totally display-based document representation, relying on the underlying PostScript semantics of PDF. Early versions of PDF had no mechanism for retaining any form of abstract document structure but recent releases have now introduced an internal structure tree to create the so called 'Tagged PDF'. This paper describes the development of a plugin for Adobe Acrobat which creates a two-window display. In one window is shown an XML document original and in the other its Tagged PDF counterpart is seen, with an internal structure tree that, in some sense, matches the one seen in XML. If a component is highlighted in either window then the corresponding structured item, with any attendant text, is also highlighted in the other window. Important applications of correctly Tagged PDF include making PDF documents reflow intelligently on small screen devices and enabling them to be read out in correct reading order, via speech synthesiser software, for the visually impaired. By tracing structure transformation from source document to destination one can implement the repair of damaged PDF structure or the adaptation of an existing structure tree to an incrementally updated document

Preservation of word processing documents

Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositorie

Automatic generation of audio content for open learning resources

This paper describes how digital talking books (DTBs) with embedded functionality for learners can be generated from content structured according to the OU OpenLearn schema. It includes examples showing how a software transformation developed from open source components can be used to remix OpenLearn content, and discusses issues concerning the generation of synthesised speech for educational purposes. Factors which may affect the quality of a learner's experience with open educational audio resources are identified, and in conclusion plans for testing the effect of these factors are outlined

HUDDL for description and archive of hydrographic binary data

Many of the attempts to introduce a universal hydrographic binary data format have failed or have been only partially successful. In essence, this is because such formats either have to simplify the data to such an extent that they only support the lowest common subset of all the formats covered, or they attempt to be a superset of all formats and quickly become cumbersome. Neither choice works well in practice. This paper presents a different approach: a standardized description of (past, present, and future) data formats using the Hydrographic Universal Data Description Language (HUDDL), a descriptive language implemented using the Extensible Markup Language (XML). That is, XML is used to provide a structural and physical description of a data format, rather than the content of a particular file. Done correctly, this opens the possibility of automatically generating both multi-language data parsers and documentation for format specification based on their HUDDL descriptions, as well as providing easy version control of them. This solution also provides a powerful approach for archiving a structural description of data along with the data, so that binary data will be easy to access in the future. Intending to provide a relatively low-effort solution to index the wide range of existing formats, we suggest the creation of a catalogue of format descriptions, each of them capturing the logical and physical specifications for a given data format (with its subsequent upgrades). A C/C++ parser code generator is used as an example prototype of one of the possible advantages of the adoption of such a hydrographic data format catalogue

Encoding models for scholarly literature

We examine the issue of digital formats for document encoding, archiving and publishing, through the specific example of "born-digital" scholarly journal articles. We will begin by looking at the traditional workflow of journal editing and publication, and how these practices have made the transition into the online domain. We will examine the range of different file formats in which electronic articles are currently stored and published. We will argue strongly that, despite the prevalence of binary and proprietary formats such as PDF and MS Word, XML is a far superior encoding choice for journal articles. Next, we look at the range of XML document structures (DTDs, Schemas) which are in common use for encoding journal articles, and consider some of their strengths and weaknesses. We will suggest that, despite the existence of specialized schemas intended specifically for journal articles (such as NLM), and more broadly-used publication-oriented schemas such as DocBook, there are strong arguments in favour of developing a subset or customization of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) schema for the purpose of journal-article encoding; TEI is already in use in a number of journal publication projects, and the scale and precision of the TEI tagset makes it particularly appropriate for encoding scholarly articles. We will outline the document structure of a TEI-encoded journal article, and look in detail at suggested markup patterns for specific features of journal articles

Research on Elaboration of an Integrated System Based on Xml Data Analysis

This paper approach the importance of XML for organizing and managing better the data based on texts. This document provides the specification for a data model for describing information organization structures (metadata) for collections of networked information. As an important result we propose a new model of an integrated system based on XML and using the data analysis It also provides some steps we must follow for this data model using XML, the Extensible Markup LanguageXML, Integrated System, Database