A multimedia and multisource document editor of an open architecture

ABSTRACT

Two of the recent developments in electronic documents are multimedia and hypermedia systems. Current multimedia systems are limited because they can not contain general third-party media in their documents. Hypermedia systems can only link documents together and cannot merge documents into compound documents. To overcome these limitations, we have implemented a prototype editor to create documents on the X Window system. Not only it opens a door for general third-party media tools to be integrated in documents, but it also allows users to compose compound documents with other documents. The corresponding metaphor for the manipulation of included media is fold-and-paste. The folded media are clipped by viewports and displayed by live processes that operate on the original copies. The key technique used to provide these functions is embedded virtual screens. With the simple and powerful mechanism of embedded virtual screens, our editor is a multimedia and multisource document editor of an open architecture with regard to containing general media in its compound documents. it expands the capability in composing multimedia documents and it provides a simple mechanism to create documents that share some information with each other.

REFERENCES

• 1: Robert Thomas, Harry C. Forsdick, Terrence R. Crowley, Richard W. Schaaf, Raymond S. Tomlinson, Virginia M. Travers, and George G. Robertson, "Diamond: A Multimedia Message System Built on a Distributed Architecture," IEEE Computer, pp 65-78, December 1985.
• 2: Nathaniel Borenstein, Craig Everhart, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Adam Stoller "A Multi-media Message System for Andrew," Proceedings oj' the USENIX Winter Technical Conference, November 1988.
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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Screen design (e.g., text, graphics, color)

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.7 DOCUMENT AND TEXT PROCESSING
      I.7.2 Document Preparation
          Subjects: Hypertext/hypermedia

General Terms:
Design, Documentation, Theory