Text formatting and DEX 3

["Barker, Sean (UK)" <sean.barker@baesystems.com>]

During DEX 3 discussions, the requirement was raised to improve
compatibility between the PLCS representation of a Task_step instruction
and the existing technical publications.

Essentially, this is a requirement to support presentation
characteristics for text. Wisely, STEP has shied away from issues of
text presentation, since human readable text was outside of what it has
been trying to do. However, in the case of maintenance manuals, this is
essentially what is required.

Rather than invent a text presentation layer, I propose to permit the
embedding of existing mark-up standards within the text string. This
would be done by applying two classifications to the Task_step:

1) Character-set in, e.g. {Half-Latin | ISO LATIN-1 | UNICODE} - if
there is no such classification, the presumption will be Half-Latin,
where Half-Latin is the subset of Latin-1 covering characters from 32 to
126 - the character set defined for part 21.
ISO LATIN-1 and UNICODE would only be available for XML implementations.

2) Text-processor in {plain | HTML | SGML | XML}, with default plain if
there is no classification.
Where plain = no formatting, HTML, SGML and XML as the standards.

XML is proposed to allow formatting into standard forms. Note, as this
would be a quoted string, it would not be interpreted as XML by the STEP
processor, only by the final display application.

Comments, observations and objections, please.


Sean Barker
0117 302 8184


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