A New Presentation Language for Structured Documents

Ethan V. Munson

Abstract

PSL is a new presentation specification language for structured documents. It is the first such language that is fully configurable and it is also extensible. PSL is able to support a very general form of out-of-order layout without having to provide a general system of tree transformations. PSL also makes an explicit distinction between the specified layout of the elements of a document and the actual layout that results from the formatting process. PSL's syntax and semantics are simple and general.

This paper describes the syntax and semantics of PSL using a simple text document as a running example and compares PSL to a number of other presentation specification languages.

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This paper appeared in the Proceedings of EP96, the International Conference on Electronic Documents, Document Manipulation and Document Dissemination, Palo Alto, CA, September 1996.