FORMATTING CARD-BASED HYPERMEDIA DOCUMENTS USING FORMATTING SCRIPT DESCRIPTIONS IN A CORRECT SEQUENCE

An automatic formatting system programmatically creates an electronic file format for card-based hypermedia documents without the knowledge of the target document format. The script-based formatting system includes an automated method for generating formatting scripts which, at run-time, are used by a commercial authoring tool to generate the document file format. With this approach, it is possible to take advantage of the script interpreter capabilities rather than interactive editing capabilities in authoring tools. The system includes a mixer where descriptions about documents are obtained by attaching formatting commands to document contents through a pre-processing procedure. The descriptions are input to an automatic scripting module which generates formatting scripts. The automatic scripting module includes an HCF generator and a formatting script interpreter. At run-time the formatting scripts are executed by the authoring tools' script interpreter to generate card-based hypermedia documents.