Information Technology - Open Document Architecture (ODA) and Interchange Format: Character Content Architectures

The purpose of the ITU-T Rec. T.410-Series / ISO/IEC 8613 is to facilitate the interchange of documents.

In the context of these Recommendations / International Standards, documents are considered to be items such as memoranda, letters, invoices, forms and reports, which may include pictures and tabular material. The content elements used within the documents may include graphic characters, raster graphic elements and geometric graphic elements, all potentially within one document.

NOTE - These Recommendations / International Standards are designed to allow for extensions, including hypermedia features, spreadsheets and additional types of content such as audio and video.

In addition to the content types defined in these Recommendations / International Standards, ODA also provides for arbitrary content types to be included in documents.

These Recommendations / International Standards apply to the interchange of documents by means of data communications or the exchange of storage data.

These Recommendations / International Standards provide for the interchange of documents for either or both of the following purposes:

- to allow presentation as intended by the originator;
- to allow processing such as editing and reformatting.

The composition of a document in interchange can take several forms:

- formatted form, allowing presentation of the document;
- processable form, allowing processing of the document;
- formatted processable form, allowing both presentation and processing.

These Recommendations / International Standards also provide for the interchange of ODA information structures used for the processing of interchanged documents.

This ITU-T Recommendation / International Standard:

- defines a character content architecture that can be used in conjunction with the document architecture defined in ITU-T Rec. T.412 / ISO/IEC 8613-2;
- defines the internal structure of content conforming to this character content architecture;
- defines those aspects of rendition applicable to the presentation of character content;
- defines the presentation and content portion attributes applicable to this character content architecture;
- describes a character content layout process which, together with the document processing model described in ITU-T Rec. T.412 / ISO/IEC 8613-2, determines the layout of character content in basic layout objects.