Design of software for text composition

Abstract

Text composition software is mainly used by compositors, who are usually not programmers, and who do not necessarily know much about the underlying technicalities of computer usage. It is important, therefore, that the text composition system be such that a compositor would have a minimum amount of learning to do. Factors such as flexibility of style specification and economical proof generation are important from a user's point of view. O n the other hand, multilingual text input, output device independence and system portability are points of concern for the system designer. In this paper, a specific text composition software system designed on the basis of such considerations is briefly described. The way in which the above-mentioned factors affect the design of the system is discussed in some detail.