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 from abstract 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 between document representations and the use of a code-replacement shadow tree in technologies such as XBL.

The code document's structure and analysis

The purpose of this paper is twofold. Firstly it presents a preliminary and ethnomethodologically-informed analysis of the way in which the growing structure of a particular program's code was ongoingly derived from its earliest stages. This was motivated by an interest in how the detailed structure of completed program `emerged from nothing' as a product of the concrete practices of the programmer within the framework afforded by the language. The analysis is broken down into three sections that discuss: the beginnings of the program's structure; the incremental development of structure; and finally the code productions that constitute the structure and the importance of the programmer's stock of knowledge. The discussion attempts to understand and describe the emerging structure of code rather than focus on generating `requirements' for supporting the production of that structure. Due to time and space constraints, however, only a relatively cursory examination of these features was possible. Secondly the paper presents some thoughts on the difficulties associated with the analytic---in particular ethnographic---study of code, drawing on general problems as well as issues arising from the difficulties and failings encountered as part of the analysis presented in the first section.