Architectural Forms, separation of formatting and loose-leaf management

["Jordi Mulet" <jmulet@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

We are involved in a SGML project and we are finalisizing the analysis phase.

At present we are thinking about how to implement the management of loose-leaf pages updates because any availabe off-the-shelf comercial implementation can cope with our needs.

We think that the concept of architectural forms can help to manage the processing the flow between the intial information structures (SGML semantic tags ) and the presentational/layout structures of the final pages. 

As Rick Jelliffe said in a past discussion on XML-dev DSSSL ( with the MIF/RTF backend for example) can help to do the transformations  to the the layout structures ( down-sizing), but we can't obtain any feedback from the layout program to the stylesheet language.

We know that others programs as Omnimark or Balise can help to down-size the SGML instances but we will need  a flow of dependence from the pages/layout to the original SGML. 

 

A possible implemention of our system would be to build three independent Databases:

    - Information SGML Database.

    - Layout Database (Quark, FrameMaker,...).

    - Page Objects Database ( PDF).

 

and a "meta-Database" to manage all the "processing" an "relationships" between the elements of each database. This "meta-Database" would control and manage the workflow and updates of the different elements.

Can architectural forms model this meta-database schema to control the three database from a top structure? Architectural forms can store all the information about processing.

How difficult would be to build a similar system ? 

It will be necessary to define property sets and grove plans for the Layout scheme and Page scheme, doesn't ? Is there any working experience on this topic ? ( PDF, Quark, FrameMaker,...) 

 

Any feedack will be of great value for us! 

 

Thanks,

Jordi Mulet 

Editorial Praxis S.A