DocEng 2011: Reflowable Documents Composed from Pre-rendered Atomic Components

The 11th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering
Mountain View, California, USA
September 19-22, 2011

Reflowable Documents Composed from Pre-rendered Atomic Components
Alex Pinkney, Steven Bagley, David Brailsford
Presented by Alex Pinkney.

ABSTRACT

Mobile eBook readers are now commonplace in today's society, but their document layout algorithms remain basic, largely due to constraints imposed by short battery life. At present, with any eBook file format not based on PDF, the layout of the document, as it ap- pears to the end user, is at the mercy of hidden reformatting and re- flow algorithms interacting with the screen parameters of the device on which the document is rendered. Very little control is provided to the publisher or author, beyond some basic formatting options. This paper describes a method of producing well-typeset, scalable, document layouts by embedding several pre-rendered ver- sions of a document within one file, thus enabling many computationally expensive steps (e.g. hyphenation and line-breaking) to be carried out at document compilation time, rather than at 'view time'. This system has the advantage that end users are not con- strained to a single, arbitrarily chosen view of the document, nor are they subjected to reading a poorly typeset version rendered on the fly. Instead, the device can choose a layout appropriate to its screen size and the end user's choice of zoom level, and the author and publisher can have fine-grained control over all layouts.