Interleaf

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Founded in 1981, Interleaf was a company that produced a technical publishing software product with the same name. It was a competitor of the Adobe FrameMaker product. Broadvision acquired Interleaf in January 2000.

The Interleaf publishing system was notable for being one of several software packages (along with AutoCAD) that was keeping the use of the Lisp programming language alive in commercial software in the late 1990s.

Interleaf's headquarter was in Cambridge, Massachusetts and later moved to Waltham, Massachusetts.

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[edit] Products

Interleaf initially only had one product, Interleaf Technical Publishing Software, Interleaf TPS. Eventually the product name changed to be just Interleaf. TPS initially only ran on workstations ( Sun, Apollo etc.), but eventually it was ported both to the Macintosh and the PC.

Interleaf was a document authoring and composition package. It provided an integrated set of tools for creating compound documents: word processing, graphics, data-driven business charts, tables, equations, image editing, automated page layout, book building-- including automatic index and table of contents, and conditional document assembly. It included several features engineered to support the production of large and complex document sets, including: centralized control over parts or all of a document (format and/or content), global search and replace/change on individual graphics objects regardless of specific orientation or position and revision management.


Other products were:

  • Interleaf Relational Document Manager (RDM) - a database document management product integrated with Interleaf
  • Interleaf WorldView - an electronic document viewer, much like Adobe Acrobat
  • Interleaf WorldView Press - an extension to Interleaf 5 which produced collections of WorldView documents which were searchable across the collection.
  • Interleaf Cyberleaf - a version of WorldView Press which produced HTML documents, BYTE Magazine Editors Choice Award in 1995 [1]

[edit] Acquisition by Broadvision

After Broadvision acquired Interleaf it changed the name of the product to Quicksilver.

According to Broadvision product description, BroadVision QuickSilver enables you to create and publish lengthy, complex documents in multiple output formats (including HTML, PDF and Postscript) and automates publishing of personalized content to BroadVision Portal. Assemble publications from a variety of text, graphic and database sources, including Microsoft Word, AutoCad, Microsoft Excel, and Oracle. Includes a complete XML authoring environment.

  • Automatically assembles documents from a variety of sources including Microsoft Word, WordPerfect and FrameMaker.
  • Supports complex authoring with reusable content and cascading changes, attribute tagging and conditional views, and automatic TOCs and indices.
  • Streamlines publishing to the BroadVision portal environment with automatic multi-file publishing, intra and inter-file links, and by leveraging qualifiers, categories and attributes in the portal.


[edit] Conversion of Interleaf Format

Interleaf never provided a precise method to export a document.

Precise manual conversion is essentially impossible because there is no clean access to the actual data of a document. Data is embedded inside Interleaf's arcane, native, coded ASCII format which was designed to be machine readable. It is extremely complex in its coded expression of styling, auto-numbering, tables, graphics, microdocuments, automated references and cross-references, and other features.

At best an attempt at manual conversion is highly labor intensive, cannot accurately reproduce certain features, and, most importantly, manual intervention in the raw, native format presents a high risk of introducing human contamination in the data. Reconstructing references and cross-references and complex tables from raw Interleaf can be nearly impossible.

Because of the small and specialized market for Interleaf conversion, neither Microsoft nor Adobe provide converters.

A long standing conversion tool is ZANDAR's TagWrite. According to ZANDAR (established 1988), TagWrite converts virtually all features of Interleaf. The entire conversion is conducted in computer memory, thus there is no risk of human contamination of the original data.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Editor. "Editor's Choice Awards 1996", BYTE Magazine, February, 1996. 

[edit] External links

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