Not much on XML Paper at Digital Print World

Although XPSland featured at GraphExpo in September, the Digital Print World show had no information about XPS paper or how it could relate to print workflows. With the uptake of Vista being slower than expected it seemed to be assumed that there is plenty of time before corporate print considers XPS as an option. This may explain why Adobe is doing not much to promote interest in MARS, a project to rewrite PDF in XML.

Strange reporting style, to concentrate on something that did not happen bu this is only a web page. There is a report on the LCC Futures Conference with a wider context at OhmyNews. More background below.

The slide is from a presentation by
David Penfold during the
LCC Futures Conference

There was a paper about MARS during the Document Engineering conference (DocEng) in Manitoba. Matthew Hardy and Philip Levy described the Unicode issues in MARS for a conference on Internationalization in October. At some point the information from the papers will appear in the UK.

The Online Information event will demonstrate the state of document technology in the UK. XML will be part of the mix in ways yet to become clarified. There could be some surprises. The conference keynote will be by Jimmy Wales from the Wikipedia. Maybe IBM will concentrate on promoting open source software.

Explanation from the introduction to Document Engineering in Winnepeg shows what is possible.

"Documents are one of the centerpieces of globally interconnected systems that store information drawn from many media and deliver that information as required by users. A document may be stored in final presentation form or may be generated on-the-fly, undergoing substantial transformations in the process. Documents may include extensive hyperlinks, thereby permitting virtual documents, and also making available structured collections of information on which to anchor automated reasoning, such as promoted through the Semantic Web. Furthermore, document technologies like XML are having a profound impact on data modeling, in part because of the way these technologies bridge and integrate a variety of paradigms. "