Optimized reprocessing of documents using stored processor state

Ollis, James A.; Brailsford, David F.; Bagley, Steven R.

Abstract

Variable Data Printing (VDP) allows customised versions of material such as advertising flyers to be readily produced. However, VDP is often extremely demanding of computing resources because, even when much of the material stays invariant from one document instance to the next, it is often simpler to re-evaluate the page completely rather than identifying just the portions that vary.

In this paper we explore, in an XML/XSLT/SVG workflow and in an editing context, the reduction of the processing burden that can be realised by selectively reprocessing only the variant parts of the document. We introduce a method of partial re-evaluation that relies on re-engineering an existing XSLT parser to handle, at each XML tree node, both the storage and restoration of state for the underlying document processing framework. Quantitative results are presented for the magnitude of the speed-ups that can be achieved.

We also consider how changes made through an appearance-based interactive editing scheme for VDP documents can be automatically reflected in the document view via optimised XSLT re-evaluation of sub-trees that are affected either by the changed script or by altered data.

Citation

Ollis, J. A., Brailsford, D. F., & Bagley, S. R. (2010). Optimized reprocessing of documents using stored processor state.

• Conference Name: ACM Symposium on Document Engineering (DocEng '10)
• End Date: Sep 24, 2010
• Publication Date: Sep 1, 2010
• Deposit Date: Feb 2, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 2, 2015
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: XSLT, SVG, VDP, variable data documents, document editing, document authoring, partial re-evaluation.
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1011802
• Publisher URL: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1860559.1860586&coll=DL&dl=GUIDE&CFID=618563739&CFTOKEN=83854889
• Additional Information: Published in: DocEng '10: proceedings of the 10th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering. New York : ACM, 2010, ISBN: 978-1-4503-0231-9. pp. 135-138, doi: 10.1145/1860559.1860586