Data processing: presentation processing of document – operator i – Presentation processing of document – Layout
Reexamination Certificate
1999-08-27
2004-11-02
Feild, Joseph H. (Department: 2178)
Data processing: presentation processing of document, operator i
Presentation processing of document
Layout
C715S252000, C715S252000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06813747
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The invention relates to the field of communications, and more particularly to the management of character set information within multipart documents so that the most appropriate font may be used to display or output multiple language documents which include an arbitrary set of languages.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
With the use of the Internet, email and related electronic services, communications software has been increasingly called upon to handle data in a variety of formats. While the barriers to simple communications have been removed from many hardware implementations, the problem of software being unable to display text in different languages remains.
For instance, a person browsing the World Wide Web may wish to input a search string in their native language. Some Web pages or search engines will simply accept that string in the form in which it was input, but not process the spelling, syntax or character set in native form. The search engine then performs a search as though the search were in English, usually resulting in no hits. Other Web pages may allow user to manually specify the desired language for browsing and searching.
To display multilingual data correctly on the output side when a document is located and ready to be outputted on a computer screen, sent to a printer or otherwise using the right font is a common problem that developers encounter when writing international applications, including Web applications.
In the pursuit of better and more uniform multilingual documents, the International Standards Organization (ISO) and other bodies have developed a universal character set standard referred to as Unicode, Version 2.0 of which was released in 1996. The current Unicode standard is a 16-bit protocol encoding 25 different scripts as well as at least 38,885 separate characters. Scripts are in general higher-level collections of related characters from a character set which may be assembled for use in one or more languages.
Ultimately, displaying Unicode data becomes a problem of dynamically selecting the closest font available on a system to best express a subject document. The commercial TrueType™ and OpenType™ font sets can only output the appropriate glyphs or symbols for a subset of Unicode ranges. It is therefore necessary to generate the right character set (charset) font flag information, that is, to identify the font best matching the data to be displayed when creating the graphical font object for display or printing.
Unfortunately, documents often originate from unknown sources and unknown languages and even if the original text is encoded in Unicode, it can be difficult to identify in which character set or Unicode target range the content has been encoded with. Once the character set is identified, it can be mapped to the corresponding font flag information used to create the logical font under a given operating system. For example, text that can be encoded as Code page 874 would be mapped to THAI_CHARSET in Microsoft™ Windows™.
The display of Unicode data consequently relates to a process of selecting a font and using whatever system application programming interface (API) is available to output the text, a process which becomes even more complicated when the text is in multiple languages. Because the selected font might not be able to render all the characters from all the different character sets used in multipart, multilanguage documents, that type of data must be broken into different textual segments that use the same character set and display them separately using the appropriate font.
Therefore, among other technical complexities, the software developer must solve at least two fundamental problems when trying to accommodate multilingual output. The first is to determine which character set or Unicode ranges the text has been encoded with. The second, to choose the font that will be able to render the characters most correctly. Other problems exist, including to develop the most appropriate font selection and output for documents containing a sequence of different languages.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The invention overcoming these and other problems in the art relates to a system and method for embedding character set information in fonts used in multipart documents, in which large-capacity fonts containing symbols applicable to a variety of languages include font tag information representing their capabilities. Application software, operating system software and other resources may therefore interrogate the font tag information to determine whether a given font may represent the characters of a message on a character-by-character basis. A linked list of matching fonts is built, which may be traversed to output the document to a screen display, printer or elsewhere. Textual documents having more than one language may be analyzed in successive runs, in which the most suitable font is selected for each segment for printing or other output.
REFERENCES:
patent: 4289411 (1981-09-01), Cornelius et al.
patent: 4428694 (1984-01-01), Ragen
patent: 4456969 (1984-06-01), Herzik et al.
patent: 4777617 (1988-10-01), Frisch et al.
patent: 4873634 (1989-10-01), Frisch et al.
patent: 5009276 (1991-04-01), Raikes et al.
patent: 5165014 (1992-11-01), Vassar
patent: 5222200 (1993-06-01), Callister et al.
patent: 5377280 (1994-12-01), Nakayama
patent: 5392419 (1995-02-01), Walton
patent: 5418718 (1995-05-01), Lim et al.
patent: 5438650 (1995-08-01), Motoyama et al.
patent: 5500931 (1996-03-01), Sonnenschein
patent: 5506940 (1996-04-01), Bamford et al.
patent: 5526469 (1996-06-01), Brindle et al.
patent: 5548507 (1996-08-01), Martino et al.
patent: 5659770 (1997-08-01), Yamada
patent: 5706413 (1998-01-01), Takabayashi et al.
patent: 5717840 (1998-02-01), Pardo
patent: 5754748 (1998-05-01), Rivers et al.
patent: 5778213 (1998-07-01), Shakib et al.
patent: 5778361 (1998-07-01), Nanjo et al.
patent: 5778400 (1998-07-01), Tateno
patent: 5793381 (1998-08-01), Edberg et al.
patent: 5802539 (1998-09-01), Daniels et al.
patent: 5812818 (1998-09-01), Adler et al.
patent: 5819303 (1998-10-01), Calhoun
patent: 5828817 (1998-10-01), Landau
patent: 5844991 (1998-12-01), Hochberg et al.
patent: 5859648 (1999-01-01), Moore et al.
patent: 5873111 (1999-02-01), Edberg
patent: 5946648 (1999-08-01), Halstead, Jr. et al.
patent: 6073147 (2000-06-01), Chan et al.
patent: 6098071 (2000-08-01), Aoyama et al.
patent: 6138086 (2000-10-01), Rose et al.
patent: 6141656 (2000-10-01), Ozbutun et al.
patent: 6157905 (2000-12-01), Powell
patent: 6240186 (2001-05-01), Hyde et al.
patent: 6321192 (2001-11-01), Houchin et al.
patent: 2001/0020243 (2001-09-01), Koppolu et al.
patent: 0 457 705 (1991-11-01), None
patent: 0 886 228 (1998-12-01), None
patent: 1 056 024 (2000-11-01), None
patent: Wo 92/15067 (1992-09-01), None
patent: WO 01/20500 (2001-03-01), None
Akira et al., Viewing multilingual documents on your local Web browser, Communications of the ACM, v.41 n.4, p. 64-65, Apr. 1998.*
Turnbull, “Alphabet soup: The Internationalization of Linux, Part I”, Linux Journal, vol. 1999, Issue 59es (Mar. 1999).*
Turnbull, “Alphabet soup: The Internationalization of Linux, Part I”, Linux Journal, vol. 1999, Issue 60es (Apr. 1999).*
Au, S. Hello, world! A guide for transmitting multilingual electronic mail. Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGUCCS Conference on Winning the Networking Game. St. Louis, MO: User Service Conference. 1995.
Feild Joseph H.
Mintz Levin Cohn Ferris Glovsky and Popeo PC
Queler Adam M
LandOfFree
System and method for output of multipart documents does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this patent.
If you have personal experience with System and method for output of multipart documents, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and System and method for output of multipart documents will most certainly appreciate the feedback.
Profile ID: LFUS-PAI-O-3360727