ALTO Styles and Layout usage

Documentation UNDER CONSTRUCTION

TextStyles Textstyles have no content. The attributes are:

FONTFAMILY
FONTSIZE
FONTCOLOR
FONTWEIGHT
FONTSTYLE
FONTPITCH
FONTCHARSET

Only FONTFAMILY and FONTSIZE are required.

Paragraph Styles Paragraph styles have no content. The attributes are:

ALIGN (Left, Right, Center, Block)
LEFT [numeric]
RIGHT [numeric]
LINESPACE [numeric]
FIRSTLINE [numeric]

Attributes of a Page Element

PAGECLASS
STYLEREFS
HEIGHT
WIDTH
PHYSICAL_IMG_NR
PRINTED_IMG_NR
QUALITY (OK, Damaged, Missing)
POSITION (Left, Right, Foldout, Single)
PROCESSING (A link to processing information)

Page Areas Each page is divided into different areas (TopMargin, LeftMargin, RightMargin, BottomMargin and PrintSpace). The margins may contain text or other objects that are not part of the main body.

The positions are given as HPOS, VPOS, WIDTH and HEIGHT.

Margins

TopMargin
The area between the top line of print and the upper edge of the leaf. It may contain page number or running title.

InnerMargin
That margin of a page adjacent to the binding edge of a book.

OuterMargin
The space between the text and the outer extremity of the leaf of a book. May contain margin notes.

BottomMargin
The area between the bottom line of letterpress or writing and the bottom edge of the leaf. It may contain a page number, a signature number or a catch word.

PrintSpace
Rectangle surrounding the printed area of a page. Page number and running title are not part of the print space.

The position of the margins on a page is illustrated in this picture:

Example of margins on a printed page.

The structure of one of the page area (PageSpace) elements

The page area elements have the attributes:

HPOS Horizontal position upper/left corner (1/10 mm) VPOS Vertical position upper/left corner (1/10 mm) WIDTH Width (1/10 mm) HEIGHT Height (1/10 mm) ROTATION In degrees as floating point number (optional)

All the subelements have those same attributes (except SP, where HEIGHT is missing) with the same meaning.

Each page area may contain any number of elements. Those elements are one of the following:

TextBlock A block of text ComposedBlock A block that consists of other blocks Illustration A picture or image GraphicalElement A graphic used to separate blocks. Mostly a line or rectangle.

Each of them may have the following attributes:

ID Unique ID STYLEREFS Reference to text or paragraph styles HPOS Horizontal position upper/left corner (1/10 mm) VPOS Vertical position upper/left corner (1/10 mm) WIDTH Width (1/10 mm) HEIGHT Height (1/10 mm) ROTATION In degrees as floating point number (optional) IDNEXT Reference to the next element related to reading order.

If the shape of the element is not rectangular an element SHAPE might be added:

Sample SHAPE XML fragment

Polygons are coded as X,y x,y ... with different coordinate pairs separated by spaces.

Circles and ellipses are, although allowed in principle, not supported by some vendor tools like docWORKS. Instead, such shapes are represented as polygons with sufficient accuracy.

A TextBlock is divided into lines and those are divided into strings, spaces and hyphens:

Meaning of those tags:

TextBlock A paragraph of text TextLine A line of text String A single word SP White space HYP Hyphenation characteristics

↑ Back to top ↑ Additional Attributes of the tags