Scribe: a document specification language and its compiler

Abstract

Abstract : It has become commonplace to use computers to edit and format documents, taking advantage of the machines' computational abilities and storage capacity to relieve the tedium of manual editing and composition. A distressing side effect of this computerization of a previously manual craft is that the responsibility for the appearance of the finished document, which was once handled by production editors, proofreaders, graphic designers, and typographers, is in the hands of the writer instead of the production staff. In this theses the author describes the design and implementation of a computer system for the production of documents, in which the separation of form and content is achieved. A writer prepares manuscript text that contains no mention of specific format; this manuscript text, represented in a document specification language, is processed by a compiler into a finished document. The compiler draws on a database of format specifications that have been prepared by a graphic designer, producing a document that contains the author's text in the designer's format. To simplify the knowledge representation task in the document design database, the document preparation task was parameterized into approximately one hundred independent variables, and the formatting compiler is controlled by changing the values of those variables. The content of the document design database is primarily tables of variable names and the values to be assigned to them. To enable substantial feedback from actual users for validating the design, parameterization, and general utility of such an approach, the resulting computer system was built as a production-quality program and documented as a piece of software rather than as an experiment.

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