Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site imsvax.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!think!harvard!seismo!elsie!imsvax!ted From: ted@imsvax.UUCP (Ted Holden) Newsgroups: net.text Subject: Navy Document Interchange Format (DIF) and Xerox 8010 "STAR" Message-ID: <423@imsvax.UUCP> Date: Wed, 9-Oct-85 10:15:18 EDT Article-I.D.: imsvax.423 Posted: Wed Oct 9 10:15:18 1985 Date-Received: Sat, 12-Oct-85 15:38:45 EDT Organization: IMS Inc, Rockville MD Lines: 108 My apologies to anyone who has seen this article more than once. We've been having major problems with usenet in the D.C. area. Since Sept. 15, when the CVL computer at U. Md. was taken down with no warning to anyone below it on usenet (which is most of the D.C. area), very little has gotten through one way or the other. For awhile, it will be difficult to tell what has gotten through and what hasn't. This article concerns word-processing document transmission and also a typesetting and graphics system which is vastly superior to TROFF and other such archaic packages which are, nonetheless, still in large-scale use on UNIX systems. The need for inter-vendor transmission of DOCUMENTS in such a manner as to preserve word processing FUNCTIONS, as well as page-image, is fairly recent. The Navy saw three or four reasons for wanting to have the capability: 1. as a guarantee that an organization doesn't lose a ten year base of documents if one particular vendor should go belly-up (i.e. they could translate their store of documents to some other vendor's format), 2. for transmitting documents around the office or around the world as opposed to printing 100 copies of a document and MAILING them to 100 people, some of whom could be in Germany or New Zealand, and 3. as a means of mixing and matching the talents of differing kinds of office equipment. It is this last possibility which should most interest Unix gurus, as I shall describe momentarily. Pairwise routines for word processing document format conversion, whether in the form of contractors or of "black boxes", are expensive, a pain to use, and generally only support a few popular formats. There is a further problem with DCA/DISOSS, which is IBM's solution to the document conversion problem; DCA itself corresponds almost exactly to the functionality of a 1965 typewriter. It is essentially impossible to write reasonably accurate translation programs between DCA and the file structure of any reasonable 1985 word processing system. Documents being transmitted from system A to system B via DCA/DISOSS can be counted on to arrive in mangled condition. A user can only feel good about sending a document over the lines if he can count on it looking right when it gets there. You particularly don't want tabs, decimal tabs, or indenting to get mis-translated or end up on the wrong columns; that could change the meaning of a document. This years numbers could end up in last years column, profits could end up looking like losses, debits as credits..... The United States Navy's Document Interchange Format (DIF, not to be confused with Visicorp's DIF, which means "Data Interchange Format") is the best available solution to these problems. The Navy DIF was deliberately set up to correspond to the file structure of a reasonable 1985 word processor, with functionality chosen as a maximum common subset of the capabilities of the products of the Navy's largest vendors. The DIF's functionality was also chosen so as to be easily "reachable" by translation programs, so that DIF translations between diverse systems tend to be surprisingly accurate, good enough, in fact, to send documents over the wire and expect them to look right when they get there. The most interesting possibility which all this has to offer to UNIX types, involves the Xerox 8010 "Star". This, or it's newest incarnation, the Xerox 6085, soon to be announced, is the world's ultimate typesetting, graphics, and publication quality word-processing system. Anything which can be done slowly and painfully with TROFF or any of it's derivatives, can be done with a few keystrokes on the 8010, exactly like using any other word-processor functions. The 8010 beats the hell out of TROFF or any other such package. The 8010 incorporates a 1024x1024 graphics screen; typesetting functions appear WYSIWYG on the screen, and its graphics are good enough for CAD-CAM. Math symbols, Greek letters, the Cyrillic alphabet, Kanji characters etc. all come easily to the 8010. Anyone who has used an 8010 would get violently ill if he ever had to use TROFF again. Now, the 8010 is not the fastest or least expensive word-processor in the world, and it used to be the odd-man-out in Xerox's line-up. Potential customers would be amazed by it but noted that it was compatible with absolutely nothing, and figured they either needed 100 of them (which they couldn't afford), or they didn't need any, and walked out shaking their heads. Given the Navy's DIF, however, since the 8010 has DIF routines, an amazing possibility presents itself. If 95 percent of the work on a given document could be done on a PC or some cheap UNIX machine, and the document then shifted body-and-soul to the 8010 for finishing touches (typesetting and/or graphic boilerplate), and then printed on the 8010's laser printer, then the power of the 8010 has been magnified 20 to 1; the input load has been effectively removed from it. An organization could thus make very good use of one or two 8010s, which are not that difficult to afford, especially since their price has come down drastically in the last year or two. Integrated MicroComputer Systems Inc. of Rockville, Md. has DIF translation programs available for the SSI WordPerfect package for PC's, as well as for the Fortune:Word package on the Fortune 32:16 micro. Either can be used with an 8010 in the manner just described. Other vendors whose word processing packages have DIF routines which have proven acceptable to the Navy include DataPoint (VistaWord), Hewlett-Packard (3000), DEC (Wps), IBM (Display-Write on the PC), AT&T (CrystalWriter), and CPT. A number of other firms are presently at work on DIF software. Anyone interested in this software may call IMS at 301 984-8343 and ask for Ted Holden, Dick Jeffries, or Gary Evans. I will also be glad to answer inquiries addressed through UNIX mail.