Style Control in the Quill Document Editing Systems

A critical problem in the design of editors for structured documents is that of style control, i.e. mapping the logical elements of the documents to their physical appearance on pages. This paper presents a novel approach to style control, used in the Quill document editing system that has been prototyped at the IBM Almaden Research Center. In our approach, the style control mechanism is an integral part of the editing system and consistent with the overall system architecture, in both its inner structure and its user interface. Properties that specify the formatting process, together with action routines for specifying complex semantics, are the basic style control primitives in the proposed approach.