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1.2 The Conventional Way of Working

   If you hear the word document, do you think about a piece of paper with 
   information on it, or several pieces of paper collected in a folder, or 
   bonded together in a book, or in a manuscript?  This is what we 
   historically would think of when we talk about documents.  There are, of 
   course, other documents that we must consider:  things that we read every 
   day, the newspaper, a magazine, E-mail, notes and letters and even 
   internet pages.  These could all be seen as documents, as they are either 
   physical or logical pieces of paper with information. 

   All of these different media have one thing in common.  They contain words 
   and pictures.  But that is where it stops.  You have to read the words, 
   and use your imagination to give life to the document.  With the help of 
   pictures, you can more accurately form the images in your imagination, but 
   they do not give life to the document itself.  The same could be said for 
   tables and charts.  They make the document easier to read and understand, 
   but you still have to think about the meaning of these charts and graphs. 

   And then consider the amount of work required to create a document, in 
   terms of typing or writing the words and capturing the pictures, creating 
   the charts, and editing the document, all the different programs and 
   applications that you have to use to perform these tasks.  You will use a 
   word processor to type in the words.  A capture or scanning program will 
   be needed to get the pictures.  You'll need another program if you need to 
   change the picture.  A spreadsheet will be needed to produce graphs and 
   tables of figures.  You'll need a database to get the information that you 
   require, and so forth. 

   Let's go back to our scenario in "A New Way of Working" in topic 1.1.  You 
   will use your word processor to type in the report.  This word processor 
   must have special links to your mail program to do the mail-merge.  Of 
   course, the mail program must be linked to the database, which must be 
   linked to the word processor so that we can have the information that is 
   in the database in the report.  To include the client's account details we 
   need to link the spreadsheet program or the database to the word 
   processor.  Both the spreadsheet and the graphs must be linked to the 
   report.  If we don't go any further, we have already used more than four 
   programs to produce a simple report.  And then the links between these 
   programs always seems to be very fragile.  Imagine writing a daily 
   newspaper this way. 

   Now imagine that you would like to add another dimension to the document, 
   such as sound and live images.  Where you can point to a word such as 
   "bird" and listen to the sound that the bird makes.  We can look at a 
   picture but then at the same time you can hit the play button at the 
   bottom of the picture and have live video on the document. 

   Now most people will say that it is nothing new.  We have these facilities 
   today within a number of programs.  Areas such as the Word Wide Web, where 
   you have links through words to other documents, sound and video.  The 
   difference is that when you click on those words they have to launch 
   another program to play the sound or video.  These Multimedia programs 
   will be integrated into the program that you are using to view the 
   document. 

   But let's take this another step further.  Instead of typing the document, 
   you can use speech recognition or handwriting recognition.  We can work in 
   a collaborative environment where more than one person could work on the 
   same document and the updates will be in real time for both the users. 

   This new document could also be able to handle foreign languages.  This 
   means that we can write the document in English and when a person who 
   speaks French loads the document that it would be in French instead of 
   English.  The program which you use to display the document must be able 
   to do the translation for you. 

   What we've just described to you is called compound documents.  One of the 
   technologies that allows us to create compound documents is OpenDoc. 

Subtopics:

   1.2.1 The 1970s - Documents by Hand
   1.2.2 The 1980s-Application-Level Integration

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