Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!know!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!julius.cs.uiuc.edu!psuvax1!rutgers!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!o.gp.cs.cmu.edu!andrew.cmu.edu!mss+ From: mss+@andrew.cmu.edu (Mark Sherman) Newsgroups: comp.text.sgml Subject: yet another "standard" representation Message-ID: Date: 25 Sep 90 20:25:52 GMT Organization: Information Technology Center, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA Lines: 57 Anyone know what is in this or where it is going? -Mark ---------------------------------------------------------------------- MacWeek, 9/25/90 p.1 "Rivals agree on DTP link: SERIF format to allow exchange across apps, platforms" by Carolyn Said San Jose, Calif. -- A broad-based coalition of computer companies next week will announce a new document interchange standard that allows for exchange of page-layout files between programs and platforms. To be announced and demonstrated at the Seybold Computer Publishing Conference & Exposition here, the standard, called SERIF (Standard Entity Rendering Interchange Format), defines the exchange of page geometry within a frame-based architecture. It will let users create a desktop publishing document in one application and open and edit it in another. For example, a user could rough out a document with Aldus PageMaker on the IBM PC and paginate and polish it in QuarkXPress on the Mac. "This would mean interoperability across the spectrum," said Craig Cline, associate editor of Seybold Reports on Desktop Publishing in Malibu, Calif. "Most people work in mixed environments. There's been a strong desire among users to exchange geometry between various pagination packages so they don't have to start from scratch." Quark Inc. and Atex Publishing Systems plan to "go into the actual nuts and bolts" of exchange between XPress and Atex documents at the Seybold show, according to Dave Stern, senior manager of public relations for Atex. Other companies may show document exchanges as well. Spearheaded by Quark Inc. of Denver; Atex of Bedford, Mass.; and IBM Corp. of Armonk, N.Y., a group called the Professional Publishing Interchange Standards Committee has been meeting since March to define a common way of exchanging page geometries. Currently composed of 19 key vendors, the committee will have a booth at Seybold and will solicit input from users and cooperation from other developers. The consortium includes Adobe Systems, Digital Equipment Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. The committee hopes to work quickly and to involve as many people as possible in formulating the standard, according to Tim Gill, Quark senior vice president. Once SERIF is usable, individual vendors will need to release add-on software modules to let their programs take advantage of it, Gill said. The standard probably will continue to evolve and grow over time, he said. The committee is targeting the American Newspaper Publishers Association convention in June 1991 as an initial release date. The SERIF standard certainly would affect the way users work, analysts said. "We're talking about allowing users to define their work flow in a way that's convenient for them, rather than having to torque their work flow around to meet the limitations of a particular product," Gill said.