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The Mars project: PDF in XML

Published: 28 August 2007 Publication History

Abstract

The Portable Document Format (PDF) is a page-oriented, graphically rich document format based on PostScript semantics. It is the file format underlying the Adobe® Acrobat® viewers and is used throughout the publishing industry for final form documents and document interchange. Beyond document layout, PDF provides enhanced capabilities, which include logical structure, forms, 3D, movies and a number of other rich features.
Developers and system integrators face challenges manipulating PDF and its data. They are looking for solutions that allow them to more easily create and operate on documents, as well as to integrate with modern XML-based document processing workflows.
The Mars document format is based on the fundamental structures of PDF, but uses an XML syntax to represent the document. Mars uses XML to represent the underlying data structures of PDF, as well as incorporating additional industry standards such as SVG, PNG, JPG, JPG2000 and OpenType. Mars combines all of these components into a ZIP-based document container.
The use of open standards in Mars means that Mars documents can be used with a large range of off-the-shelf tools and that a larger population of developers will be very familiar with its underlying technology. Using these standards, publishers gain access to all of the richness of PDF, but can now tightly integrate Mars into their document workflows.

References

[1]
Adobe Systems Incorporated, PDF Reference, 5th ed., Berkley: Peachpit Press, 2005. 0-321-30474-8.
[2]
Adobe Systems Incorporated, PostScript Language Reference Manual, 3rd ed., Menlo Park: Addison-Wesley, 1999. 0-201-37922-9.
[3]
International Organization for Standardization, Document management -- Electronic document file format for longterm preservation -- Part 1: Use of PDF 1.4 (PDF/A-1), 2005. ISO 19005-1:2005.
[4]
International Organization for Standardization, Graphic technology -- Prepress digital data exchange -- Use of PDF-- Part 1: Complete exchange using CMYK data (PDF/X-1 and PDF/X-1a), 2001. ISO 15930-1:2001.
[5]
World Wide Web Consortium, Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0, 4th ed., 2006. {Online} http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/REC-xml-20060816/
[6]
World Wide Web Consortium, Mobile SVG Profiles: SVG Tiny and SVG Basic, 2003. {Online} http://www.w3.org/TR/SVGMobile/
[7]
Adobe Systems Incorporated, PDF Reference, 6th ed., San Jose: Adobe Systems Incorporated, 2006.
[8]
M. R. B. Hardy, D. F. Brailsford, "Mapping and Displaying Structural Transformations between XML and PDF", in ACM Symposium on Document Engineering, 2002, pp. 95--102.
[9]
World Wide Web Consortium, Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Core Specification, 2004. {Online} http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-3-Core
[10]
PKWare Incorporated, Zip Format Specification Application Note, 1989. {Online} http://www.pkware.com/index.php?option=com_content&tas k=view&id=64&Itemid=107
[11]
Adobe Systems Incorporated, Mars Project, 2006. {Online} http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/mars
[12]
PDFTron Systems Incorporated, PDF2SVG, 2007. {Online} http://www.pdftron.com/pdf2svg/

Cited By

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  • (2016)The Influence of E-book Format and Reading Device on Users’ Reading Experience: A Case Study of Graduate StudentsPublishing Research Quarterly10.1007/s12109-016-9472-532:4(319-330)Online publication date: 28-Jul-2016
  • (2009)Engineering Information Into Open DocumentsOpen Information Management10.4018/978-1-60566-246-6.ch002(9-19)Online publication date: 2009
  • (2009)Multi-resolution Mechanism for SVGProceedings of the 2009 Asia-Pacific Conference on Information Processing - Volume 0210.1109/APCIP.2009.171(139-143)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2009

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cover image ACM Conferences
DocEng '07: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM symposium on Document engineering
August 2007
236 pages
ISBN:9781595937766
DOI:10.1145/1284420
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 28 August 2007

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  1. Mars
  2. PDF
  3. SVG
  4. XML
  5. package
  6. zip

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DocEng07
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DocEng07: ACM Symposium on Document Engineering
August 28 - 31, 2007
Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada

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Overall Acceptance Rate 194 of 564 submissions, 34%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2016)The Influence of E-book Format and Reading Device on Users’ Reading Experience: A Case Study of Graduate StudentsPublishing Research Quarterly10.1007/s12109-016-9472-532:4(319-330)Online publication date: 28-Jul-2016
  • (2009)Engineering Information Into Open DocumentsOpen Information Management10.4018/978-1-60566-246-6.ch002(9-19)Online publication date: 2009
  • (2009)Multi-resolution Mechanism for SVGProceedings of the 2009 Asia-Pacific Conference on Information Processing - Volume 0210.1109/APCIP.2009.171(139-143)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2009

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