COMPOUND ELECTRONIC DOCUMENT CREATION, STORAGE, RETRIEVAL, AND DELIVERY IN BELL-NORTHERN RESEARCH AND NORTHERN TELECOM

摘要

The increased screen definition and computing power of today's Macintosh, PC and Unix workstations makes realistic the goal of creating a compound electronic database with truly integrated text and graphics. Such a system, named COMPASS, has been developed by Northern Telecom (NT) and is currently being used to deliver documentation on CD-ROM to customers for products such as the NT DMS-100 telephone switch. COMPASS takes output from commercial authoring systems in PostScript format, creates indices and converts it into Computer Graphic Metafile (CGM) format. CGM is an ANSI-standard method of representing text and images by using graphical primitives. The size of the file is reduced significantly from the PostScript input file and the data is now in a standard binary form which can be accessed by different applications running on a variety of workstations.rnDevelopment is now underway to create hypertext links and to extend COMPASS into being a real-time system where users can browse a master index and have CGM document files downloaded to their workstation for local use. The search and navigate software now exists on Macintosh, IBM PC (under MS Windows) and Unix (under X-windows) platforms for accessing common CGM document files.