In this paper, we describe an approach for automatic reading of text information from field technician's maps as used in the telecom industry. Given three anchor points as specified by a human operator, the technique isolates the object (cable, or street etc.), identifies all text blocks associated with that object, and converts all information in these text blocks into field data more amenable to future computer manipulation and easy access. The overall algorithm is composed of four main sub-algorithms-contour formation to encompass the object of interest, identification and decomposition of text blocks, identification of individual text blocks by means of HMM based handwriting recognition technique, and finally post-processing of word recognition results by means of field specific knowledge. The success of the algorithm is demonstrated by means of suitable experiments.

The use of the term ‘Electronic Publishing’ transcends any early notions of ‘the paperless office’ and of purely electronic transfer and dissemination of information over networks. It now encompasses all computer-associated methods for the production of documents and includes the imaging of a document on paper as one of the options to be provided by an integrated processing scheme. Electronic publishing draws heavily on techniques from computer science and information technology but technical, legal, financial and organisational problems have to be overcome before it can replace traditional publication mechanisms. These problems are illustrated with reference to the publication arrangements for the journal Electronic Publishing – Origination, Dissemination and Design, of which the authors of this paper are the co-editors. This journal appears in traditional form but relies on a wide variety of support from ‘electronic’ technologies in the pre-publication phase.

No abstract available.

No abstract available.

This paper presents an overview of the Cedar programming environment, focusing on its overall structure—that is, the major components of Cedar and the way they are organized. Cedar supports the development of programs written in a single programming language, also called Cedar. Its primary purpose is to increase the productivity of programmers whose activities include experimental programming and the development of prototype software systems for a high-performance personal computer. The paper emphasizes the extent to which the Cedar language, with run-time support, has influenced the organization, flexibility, usefulness, and stability of the Cedar environment. It highlights the novel system features of Cedar, including automatic storage management of dynamically allocated typed values, a run-time type system that provides run-time access to Cedar data type definitions and allows interpretive manipulation of typed values, and a powerful device-independent imaging model that supports the user interface facilities. Using these discussions to set the context, the paper addresses the language and system features and the methodologies used to facilitate the integration of Cedar applications. A comparison of Cedar with other programming environments further identifies areas where Cedar excels and areas where work remains to be done.

If there is to be widespread acceptance of computer generated images in areas traditionally served by graphic artists, these images must meet a high standard of quality. Document preparation systems are an application area that is gaining maturity in providing high-quality computer typeset documents. These systems exhibit a trend towards specifying the formatting information for a document separately from the body of the text. The goal is to have the document format designed by someone with expert knowledge of typography. Writers can then apply a format to their own work simply by indicating the semantic content of their text, such as the headings, paragraphs, or footnotes. The result is that a writer can produce properly typeset documents without learning the esthetics of typography. This paper extends this idea to encompass the illustrations in the text. We have developed a prototype system that uses a set of graphical style rules to define the design guidelines for the illustrations. The rules, called a graphical style sheet, can be used to control a uniform “look” over a set of illustrations, or to change the appearance of a particular illustration to reflect different publishing styles or different media. The prototype coordinates with an existing document preparation system and the combined systems were used to produce this paper. We conclude that this is a viable method for controlling image style for at least one class of illustrations. This approach contributes to image quality by providing a method for capturing knowledge of graphic arts standards, and for ensuring a consistent appearance of related illustrations within technical documentation.

An innovative design for an interactive paint program has been developed based on multiple processes and message passing. Traditional paint programs combine interrupt-driven support of a graphical input device, such as a mouse or tablet, with the coloring of pixels in a raster display. We advocate a different design methodology which is illustrated in our implementation. The multiple processes and message passing primitives provided by some real-time operating systems encourage the design of parallel-program architectures and anthropomorphic programming structures, analogous to artist procedures and the metaphors of Smalltalk.