Multipage Document Images On The Internet

While client/server document imaging systems have matured considerably, fully satisfactory mechanisms for distributing and providing interactive access to document images over the World-Wide Web have not yet emerged. The interface functionality of most scanned document viewers and browsers is primitive compared to what is available for revisable-form electronic documents. Common image viewers provide only scrolling within a page, change of magnification and jumping to the next/previous page. By contrast, electronic document browsers often provide content-based operations such as string search with highlighting of search hits, up-down-next-previous navigation through logical structure trees, and hypertext links from indexes and tables of contents to body text. Recently, there have been a number of efforts aimed at enlivening imaged documents by providing more content-based interfaces. Examples include Adobe Capture, Dienst, Xeroxu0027s DocuWeb, and the UC Berkeley multivalent document browser. This paper reviews some of the methods currently used for transmitting and browsing page images of documents on the Internet and presents a design for adding some desirable features to future document image browsers.