ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34 N1xxx

ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34/WG2 N368

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34

Information Technology --
Document Description and Processing Languages

Requirement for TR on writing a formatting specification

Title:  Guidelines for Writing Formatting Specifications for Document 
Rendering Systems

Purpose and justification:

When a structured document is interchanged between an originator and 
a recipient, the recipient refers to the style specifications that 
the originator provides to reconstruct the presentation.  The 
existing ISO/IEC 24754 applies to the document processing 
environment, listing the features that a rendering system may have in 
support of the requirements expressed in the style specification.
The style specification is used to guide the writing of a transformation.

This technical report does not prescribe the use of any particular 
transformation technology or document rendering system, and the 
formatting specifications created by following the guidelines are 
agnostic to any rendering technology used for layout.  Normative 
addressing and querying specifications support the access to XML 
documents or any structured information stream that can be regarded 
through a data model suitable for XML documents.

Scope:

This new part is a technical report guiding the originator of the 
structure document in writing the style specification for 
reconstructing the desired presentation.  Such a "formatting 
specification" document from the originator refers to functionality 
described by ISO/IEC 24754 and gives the recipient concrete 
requirements for formatting properties of a rendered result.

Using such guidelines to express the desired reconstruction of the 
presentation helps originators and recipients establish those 
document rendering requirements described in ISO/IEC 24754 that need 
to be supported by the document rendering system.  Furthermore, the 
formatting specification should be sufficient to the recipient to 
satisfy the task of writing of the rendering transformation desired 
by the originator.


Related documents:

   ISO/IEC 24754 Minimum requirements for specifying document rendering systems
   W3C XML Path Language (XPath) 1.0 http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath
   W3C XML Path Language (XPath) 2.0 http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath20/

Overview:

1 Scope
2 Terms and Definitions
3 Generated and retrieved content
3.1 Specifying generated content
3.2 Specifying retrieved content using XPath
4 Page geometry and composition specification
5 Line-level processing specification
6 Character-level processing specification
A Example formatting specification