Waltham, Massachusetts-based Interleaf Inc, which explained its ideas for adding a degree of intelligence to dumb documents with its Active Documents concept last year (CI No 1,677), has taken the idea a stage or two further with Interleaf WorldView, designed to enable organisations to take text and graphic documents from virtally any source and look at them on virtually any computer – with advanced techniques for finding specific information. WorldView Press takes documents from all major word processors, desktop publishing packages, computer-aided design software and so forth, reformats them for on-line viewing; compresses them, and adds hyperlinks and a full text index. This results, it says, in a set of documents ready to be viewed on any of the computers WorldView supports – MS-DOS boxes, Macintoshes, workstations and mainframes. An end-user can view a document, attach electronic sticky notes, use the hyperlinks and full text retrieval capabilities, zoom in, and print a copy on any standard printer. The company wants to get the product widely adopted, so WorldViewer costs manufacturers just $10 in volume. An end-user licence costs $200. The WorldView Press, designed for document producers, costs $10,000. It takes input in PostScript, WordPerfect, Microsoft Word RTF, WordStar, HPGL, PICT, MacDraw, MacPaint, TIFF, CGM and SGML formats, and others. It prints hard copy on PostScript, PCL and Epson-compatible printers. Interleaf will also support Adobe Systems Inc’s planned format for electronic distribution when it is available. WorldView will view those files, and Interleaf 5 document creation product will output files in that format. Next quarter, WorldView Press will be available on RISC-based workstations, and WorldViewer will be available on MS Windows, and on Unix workstations under Motif and Open Look. After mid-year, WorldViewer will also be up on the Macintosh and under MS-DOS, with the IBM MVS version to follow. Supported workstations will include Hewlett-Packard and Apollo, Data General, Digital Equipment Corp, IBM Corp, Silicon Graphics Inc and Sun Microsystems Inc.
