A team project by students at the University of Bremen from October 1992 to September 1994 (January 1995)
We had an idea to create a wordprocessing package emphasizing new important features for the creation of a document.
A special purpose for doing this was the emphasis of the logical and hierarchical structure of text. Almost each text lets itself be grouped into certain categories -- e.g. letter, bibliography, papers, etc --. Each group of documents has therefore its own structure, which is marked by a number of text elements like headings, subheadings etc. and its order. In a letter it would be the elements of the addressee, sender, date, salutation, text itself and the forms of greetings.
The creation of a text, including its structure, happens interactivly. All changes will be made visible at once. Therefore, because the structure of a text is known, many possibilities and advantages of this text are possible.
Each text has presentation rules assigned determining the look of the format. With a series of different presentation rules for one and the same document now different formats could be produced, and thereby - different views. In the light of that, one could possibly support the formation of multi language documents, which are diffently formatted according to its own language.
A ForauS document consists of three components: a document-type-definition (DTD), the actual text and the presentation rules.
The DTD decribes the logical structure of a document group. It determines the elements and their order, which are present in a document. A DTD is part of the language SGML presenting the logical description of documents. SGML is an acronym for Standard Generalized Markup Language and is an ISO-standard used more and more in business for the system independent exchange of documents.
The actual text contains additional information, so called markups, giving a section of a text a logical element of the DTD.
The presentation rules contain all attributes and rules necessary for the creation of the text -- borders, fonts and much more. They determine also, what is seen as an output either on the monitor or a printer.
The strong points of the ForauS-system is the emphatic support of the logical structure of a text when there is an interactive search. Documents are created, which are wonderful to look at because of its unified structure and look. That this makes sense is shown by its use - especially in bigger companies and businesses, for instance, in the automobile industry and airline industry respectively where they have started to change to SGML. ForauS supports this standard and is thereby well equipped for the future.
Mentor of this project:
Prof. Dr. Bernd Krieg-Brückner
Michael Fröhlich
Mattias Werner
Department of computer science
University of Bremen
The following documents were created during the ongoing project:
| Document | Pages | PostScript | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
Requirements for an innovative system for word processing | 97 | 246531 | 229428 |
|
Requirements definition | 13 | 34484 | 21588 |
|
Presentation rules | 27 | 52801 | 117010 |
|
Handout | 2 | in 188811 out 72740 |
281676 |
|
Play script for a special performance | 4 | 82655 | 13167 |
|
Project report | 72 | 266361 | 434786 |
|
Programm documention | 600 | 710270 | 1651484 |
|
User Handbook | |||