Introduction

The subject matter of this paper stems from ideas developed in the context of a research contribution made in Lausanne on a document preparation project. The initial goal to produce technical reports has been broadened to solve more general document preparation problems (flexibility, modularity).

As interactive editing systems that include sophisticated typographical features become more fashionable, one might expect traditional formatting techniques to give way. The fact that this is not really the case is due to the advantages and shortcomings inherent in either approach: fast viewing and nice man-machine interface on the WYSIWYG systems, highest typographical quality and greater portability of documents through a variety of textprocessing software on the markup based textfile formatters.

Attempting to combine the good sides of both above mentioned approaches entails several requirements. First, the formatting process needs a flexible parametrisation that provides descriptive formatting specification, clearly separated from the document's content. This approach should offer more flexibility and guarantee portability of a document to several systems with different printing devices. Second, a multi-tasking environment should permit to blend user-comfort with the high typographic quality realized by sophisticated formatting functions.