A Multimedia Document System Based on TEX and DVI Documents

This paper examines the development of a multimedia document system based on m. Multimedia document systems involve the design of many complex components including editors, formatters, display systems and components to support the content types used (text, images, graphics etc.). By using T@ to do the formatting, using a standard text editor to enter the document text contents and define the document structure, and modifying a DVI previewer to include support for non-text contents, the amount of effort in developing a multimedia document system is greatly reduced. Multimedia includes time independent information such as text, graphics and raster images and time dependent information such as audio and video. The added time dimension means that documents are structured not only in space but temporally. Multimedia information is inserted into T@ documents by means of multimedia macros and the resulting document is called a multimedia T@ document. This document is formatted by 7&X to produce an extension of the standard DVI file, called a multimedia DVI file, that contains embedded multimedia commands. Since it could not be foreseen all the different content types that potentially could be used. a flexible approach was taken by using standard terminology, based on a standard model for representing multimedia information, for defining the macros and embedded DVI commands. In order to present multimedia DVI documents, an existing DVI preview program was modified to interface to the different 110 devices and to support the document constructs needed for multimedia. It uses available image and audio processing software; however, software to integrate the various components had t o be developed. The remainder of this paper describes an overview of the system structure, the structure and definition of multimedia 'l&X and DVI documents and a description of the presentation program. 2 System Structure