Speculative document evaluation

ABSTRACT

Optimisation of real world Variable Data printing (VDP) documents is a difficult problem because the interdependencies between layout functions may drastically reduce the number of invariant blocks that can be factored out for pre-rasterisation.

This paper examines how speculative evaluation at an early stage in a document-preparation pipeline, provides a generic and effective method of optimising VDP documents that contain such interdependencies.

Speculative evaluation will be at its most effective in speeding up print runs if sets of layout invariances can either be discovered automatically, or designed into the document at an early stage. In either case the expertise of the layout designer needs to be supplemented by expertise in exploiting potential invariances and also in predicting the effects of speculative evaluation on the caches used at various stages in the print production pipeline.

REFERENCES

• 1: Fabio Giannetti and Royston Sellman. Anvil: VDP Segmented Workflow Toolset. In HP Labs Technical Report HPL-2007-18, February 2007.
• 2: D. DeBronkart and P. Davis. PPML (Personalized Print Markup Language): a new XML-based industry standard print language. In XML Europe 2000, pages 1--14, June 2000.
• 3: Felipe Rech Meneguzzi , Leonardo Luceiro Meirelles , Fernando Tarlá Martins Mano , Joao Batista de Souza Oliveira , Ana Cristina Benso da Silva, Strategies for document optimization in digital publishing, Proceedings of the 2004 ACM symposium on Document engineering, October 28-30, 2004, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA [doi>10.1145/1030397.1030429]
• 4: Alexander J. Macdonald , David F. Brailsford , John Lumley, Evaluating invariances in document layout functions, Proceedings of the 2006 ACM symposium on Document engineering, October 10-13, 2006, Amsterdam, The Netherlands [doi>10.1145/1166160.1166168]
• 5: John Lumley, Roger Gimson, and Owen Rees. Extensible Layout in Functional Documents. In SPIE/EI 2006 Digital Publishing Conference, January 2006.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  E. Data
  E.1 DATA STRUCTURES
      Subjects: Trees

General Terms:
Algorithms, Documentation, Experimentation

Keywords:
PPML, SVG, VDP, document layout, optimisation, speculative evaluation