Position Papers - April 25th '96

These are a set of position papers submitted by participants attending the W3C Workshop on High Quality from the Web, April 25th '96, held in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Printing for JSTOR by Spencer W. Thomas
Established in August 1995, JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization created with the assistance of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in information technology. In pursuing this mission, JSTOR has adopted a system-wide perspective, taking into account the sometimes conflicting needs of scholars, libraries and publishers.
ISBU/FTP Software Inc. by Harald Skardal
Brief summary of FTP Software's interest in printing from the Web.
Paperless Society a Myth by Hal Schectman
Discussion of why we do not actually have a paperless society.
Micro Type Express: Lossless Font Compression Technology by Greg Porell
MicroType Express is a lossless, on-the-fly compression technology for TrueType and Type 1 fonts that helps reduce character file size and ensure character fidelity and quality.
1996, Gutenberg, And the Revenge of Movable Type by B.C. Krishna
At FutureTense, Inc., we have been developing a Web publishing tool called FutureTense Texture. Texture has two parts: a Win32 (Mac to follow) authoring tool and a Java-based viewer.
PANOSE: An Ideal Typeface Matching System for the Web by Robert Stevahn, Hewlett-Packard Company
PANOSE is the industry-standard font classification and matching system. It greatly reduces many of the font replacement problems arising from missing fonts and incompatible font names, particularly in cross-platform environments. PANOSE is used by many popular software vendors. PANOSE Partners include Lotus, Corel and Adobe.

PANOSE is particularly well suited to the World Wide Web, given the Web's emphasis on flexibility in document display, rather than on strict document layout conformance. PANOSE is now owned by Hewlett Packard Co., as a result of its recent acquisition of ElseWare Corp. While PANOSE is currently a commercial standard, HP is actively working to place it into the hands of an appropriate standards body.

Font Delivery for HTML Documents by Ben Bauermeister, Hewlett-Packard Company
As the audience on the Web grows to include more commercial activity and present information in a more visual context, the use of type as a visual element needs to be supported. While the initial response to a need for better typographic support has focused around compression, a better understanding of what the real Web needs are, where emerging technologies have stumbled in the past with regard to type, and where the work needs to be implemented for robust Web based type solutions indicates that cooperative efforts need to be established to attain the goal of easy to access and visually appealing information on the web.
Optimizing Printing Output For the Web by Andrew Mutz, Ho John Lee, Hewlett-Packard Company
We propose an extension to HTTP content negotiation based on the intended output device. This would allow output to be tailored for display versus printing, based on information about the client environment such as color, resolution, and output size. Different printing scenarios could be implemented, ranging from simple schemes providing display pages and printable pages, up through more complex schemes in which the server performs all rendering and simply transmits formatted bits to the client.
HTML Layout Extensions by Sylvan Butler and Roberta MacMillan, Hewlett-Packard
Stephen Waters, Microsoft
Looking at the layout effects possible with contemporary desktop publishing applications can be rather overwhelming. While much of what exists is far beyond the current capability of HTML, or the needs of the majority of web publishers, there are some effects which are frequently needed and obviously lacking in the creations of web authors today.

This document is a discussion of features culled from the layouts of many current web and printed pages. It is not meant to be a complete proposal or specification. It is meant to stimulate discussion into areas where improvements can and need to be made.

Internet and Intranet Printing by Stephen Waters, Microsoft
Internet Printing is a broad subject that touches on all aspects of the printing experience for devices attached to the internet or to an intranet. Falling under this large category are such diverse printing topics as Web pages, documents, Web enabled applications, User Agent features, printer selection, control, and status, server side printing, document interchange, and service bureau printing. Many print features are strictly the purview of the User Agent (UA). This document will concentrate on Internet trends and the other half of the quality printing equation: authoring considerations. It will discuss features and methodologies to be made available to the publishers of material that may ultimately be printed from the internet. A separate paper, provides more details on the HTML extensions proposed.

A position paper on typographic integration of HTML by Leslie Cuff

Quality Printing on the Web by Stephen Zilles, Adobe
There are many issues involved with printing documents available on the Web. In this statement, I only wish to address two of the major issues: a media type for resolution independent graphcs and fonts. Adobe Systems believes HTML and the Portable Document Format (PDF) are complementary. A good example of the synergistic relationship possible between HTML and PDF is using PDF for graphical objects within HTML documents. The case for PDF as a media type for graphics in HTML is presented in the second section of this paper.
Towards Quality Printing of Web Documents by Brad Chase, Bitstream Inc.
Over the past year, Bitstream has been working closely with industry leaders to resolve the problems of formatting, displaying, and printing web documents. This work, combined with Bitstream's experience in the font and printing industries has led to a number of insights in the areas of fonts, style sheets, and media types.
A Modest Proposal to Make Web Printing More Satisfying by John C. Thomas
Since I find it easier to read long textual documents from a printed page than from my workstation screen, I find myself reaching for the "Print" button in my favorite web browser any time a document must be scrolled more than a few times. This becomes inconvenient, however, if the document has many HyperText links, since the document tree must be manually traversed. The "[Next]" link which is beginning to appear on web pages from some of the more professionally administered web sites is only a partial solution. The tool I want is an interactive web crawler which retrieves, indexes and prints a document and any linked documents out to some predefined sphere of context.
Electronic Publishing by Sumner M. Saitz < sumner@harlequin.com>.
Harlequin as a leader in high-quality electronic printing would like to collaborate with other members of the W3C to develop open standards and solutions to the rapidly growing demands of the Web community.
Proposal for a Standard Color Space for the Internet by Matthew Anderson/, Ricardo Motta/Hewlett-Packard, Srinivasan Chandrasekar/Microsoft, Michael Stokes/Hewlett-Packard
HP and Microsoft propose the addition of support for a standard color space within the Microsoft OS's, HP products and the Internet. The aim of this color space is to complement the current color management strategies by enabling a third method of handling color in the OS's and the Internet that utilizes a simple and robust device independent color definition that will provide good quality with minimum transmission and system overhead. Based on a colorimetric RGB color space well suited to CRT monitors, television, scanners, digital cameras, and printing systems, such a space can be supported with minimum cost to software and hardware vendors. Our intent here is to promote its adoption by showing the benefits of supporting a standard color space, the suitability of the standard color space we are proposing, and describe some of the system issues and propose a methodology for its implementation on the Web.
Proposal for Font Embedding on the WWW by Andrew Pennock
a high-level proposal for embedding fonts in HTML documents on the World Wide Web. Clients interact with platform-specific services (called "embedding services" in this document) that provide much of the embedding functionality.