A high-level approach to computer document formatting

The very best document-formatting system is a good secretary. He can be given scrawled handwritten text in no particular format, and without further instruction produce a flawless finished document. Nevertheless, we believe that document formatting should be done by computers, because so much of it is the tedium that computers handle so well. Existing computer document formatting programs have met with some success; indeed, most computer systems offer some sort of text formatting capability. These programs are often difficult to use, and are almost invariably tied to a particular kind of printing device.The document-formatting language Scribe was designed to provide a simple, portable language in which document formatting could be specified; the Scribe compiler was written to process that language into finished documents. In following sections we describe the design goals, the implementation, and report on experience with the completed system.