Document processing, theory, and practice

Abstract

Document processing has a very wide scope; therefore, I will concentrate on a few aspects of document processing (to the exclusion of others), namely, the communication, manipulation, querying, and typesetting of textual documents. I aim to persuade you that document processing is a fertile topic in that it raises questions in areas as diverse as: programming languages, databases, systems, algorithms, and formal language theory. In addition, the kinds of questions are also diverse: they range from the theoretical to the practical with stops in between.

This work was supported under Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada grants.