Overview

Many different electronic document formats are in use today, they can be devided into three groups, as shown in Figure 1.

  

Figure 1: The three groups of document formats and their relationship

[width=0.7]bild16.eps

Target formats are the ones which existing documents are converted to and which are used in keeping documents for reading and other usage. Existing documents are produced in one of several source formats, usually by the author of a book, using some text processor. Some of these source formats can be brought into the desired target format either directly or via some intermediate format that can then be converted into the final (target) format in a second step.

 

Table 1: Summary on document formats

Name	Category	Standard	Structure	More information
HTML	Target	open	ascii	http://www.w3.org/
PDF	Target	open	binary	[12]
PostScript	Intermediate	open	ascii	[2], [3], [4]
DVI	Intermediate	source	binary	[9]
RTF	Intermediate	open	ascii	[11]
LaTeX	Source	source	ascii	[9]
WinWord	Source	vendor	binary	http://www.microsoft.com/
FrameMaker	Source	vendor	binary	http://www.frame.com/

Table 1 describes some of the attributes of the formats in these three categories. The ``Name'' column indicates the name of a certain document format. The category into which the document format belongs (see Fig. 1) is indicated by the ``Category'' column. ``Standard'' indicates whether there is an open standard either by some independent group or a vendor (`open'), the format's fixed according to some reference implementation (`source'), or the format is defined by some vendor and may change at any time (`vendor'). The ``Structure'' column tells if the contents of a file confirming to any of the formats listed can be read without a special tool (`ascii'), or if special software is needed to process documents in that format (`binary'). Finally, the ``More information'' colunm lists some references on where to get more information on the given document format.