Incremental document formatting
Pehong Chen, Michael A. Harrison, Ikuo Minakata · 1988
The incremental techniques reported in this paper are an outgrowth of work on the VORTEX system [6].Although, the techniques and algorithms developed extend beyond this particular system per se, it does remain our canonical example.Since our prototype implementation is for VORTEX, we will describe the overall idea of the system first.Many more details may be found in References [5,6,7].VORTEX is an integrated document preparation environment capable of producing high quality technical documents which involve mathematics, text, and graphics.In VORTEX, both source and target representations of a document are maintained and presented.The source representation refers to a TEEX document in its original unformatted form; the target representation presents its formatted result.The user can edit both representations using a text editor and what is called a proof editor, respectively.Our editor is an Emacs-like editor written in our own VLisp (VORTEX Lisp).Changes made to one representation propagate to the other version automatically.It is easy to support source modifications that cause the target representation to change, but a major research issue is the transformation from a target version back to the source version.The system reformats a document and redisplays it on the screen incrementally.Only the part of the document or the subregion of the screen that is affected by recent changes is reprocessed.This is part of a larger environment