In 1996 we plan to be adding verbs to the AID language to enable the Unibase by DMAC environment to produce easily compound and multimedia documents in both electronic and hard copy formats. Image and bar code support is in the process of being added. A review of four types of multimedia documents, their formats, and their viewers/browsers was undertaken.

On-line Help and Books Studied

First studied were the on-line help, book and encyclopedia systems provided with new computer systems. Several presentation systems including those in Packard Bell's Navigator, Bob, Tandem, Unixware and Microsoft Windows 95 and in C++ visual development environments were analyzed.

World Wide Web Studied

Heavily studied were the viewers/browsers used on Internet -- such as Netscape. The world wide web is really just a series of interconnected multimedia documents being viewed with fancier and fancier viewers. Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) is the markup language with which World Wide Web hypertext documents are written, and is what allows users to create hypertext links, fill-in forms, and clickable images.

Industry Standards Studied

Evolving compound document standards such as OLE, CORBA, and OpenDoc were reviewed.

Adobe PDF Formats Studied & Used

Adobe Systems Incorporated Portable Document Format (PDF) was studied in depth. The Unibase by DMAC, Release 7.4i, manuals were moved electronically to PDF files and viewed on line. This on-line manual format is the same as that used by InputAccel.  The Unibase by DMAC manual set for 7.4i will be available on-line through the Adobe Acrobat reader.

Experiments Started

Experiments were undertaken combining standard Unibase by DMAC tiff images and snippets of images with indexes and various retrieval approaches. Creating, indexing, outputting, and presevering screens with text, snippets of images and index information went on and on to help define the verbs needed in the AID language for easy document creation. The new verbs and control functions are being defined. If you want to see a particular function supported, let us know.