ALTO <Styles> & <Layout> Usage

TextStyles

Textstyles have no content. The attributes are:

• FONTFAMILY
• FONTSIZE
• FONTCOLOR
• FONTWEIGHT
• FONTSTYLE
• FONTPITCH
• FONTCHARSET

Only FONTFAMILY and FONTSIZE are required.

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Paragraph Styles

Paragraph styles have no content. The attributes are:

• ALIGN (Left, Right, Center, Block)
• LEFT [numeric]
• RIGHT [numeric]
• LINESPACE [numeric]
• FIRSTLINE [numeric]

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Attributes of a Page Element

• PAGECLASS
• STYLEREFS
• HEIGHT
• WIDTH
• PHYSICAL_IMG_NR
• PRINTED_IMG_NR
• QUALITY (OK, Damaged, Missing)
• POSITION (Left, Right, Foldout, Single)
• PROCESSING (A link to processing information)

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Page Areas

Each page is divided into different areas (TopMargin, LeftMargin, RightMargin, BottomMargin and PrintSpace). The margins may contain text or other objects that are not part of the main body.

The positions are given as HPOS, VPOS, WIDTH and HEIGHT.

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Margins

TopMargin

The area between the top line of print and the upper edge of the leaf. It may contain page number or running title.

InnerMargin

That margin of a page adjacent to the binding edge of a book.

OuterMargin

The space between the text and the outer extremity of the leaf of a book. May contain margin notes.

BottomMargin

The area between the bottom line of letterpress or writing and the bottom edge of the leaf. It may contain a page number, a signature number or a catch word.

PrintSpace

Rectangle surrounding the printed area of a page. Page number and running title are not part of the print space.

The position of the margins on a page is illustrated in this picture:

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The structure of one of the page area (PageSpace) elements

The page area elements have the attributes:

HPOS

Horizontal position upper/left corner (1/10 mm)

VPOS

Vertical position upper/left corner (1/10 mm)

WIDTH

Width (1/10 mm)

HEIGHT

Height (1/10 mm)

ROTATION

In degrees as floating point number (optional)

All the subelements have those same attributes (except SP, where HEIGHT is missing) with the same meaning.

Each page area may contain any number of elements. Those elements are one of the following:

TextBlock

A block of text

ComposedBlock

A block that consists of other blocks

Illustration

A picture or image

GraphicalElement

A graphic used to separate blocks. Mostly a line or rectangle.

Each of them may have the following attributes:

ID

Unique ID

STYLEREFS

Reference to text or paragraph styles

HPOS

Horizontal position upper/left corner (1/10 mm)

VPOS

Vertical position upper/left corner (1/10 mm)

WIDTH

Width (1/10 mm)

HEIGHT

Height (1/10 mm)

ROTATION

In degrees as floating point number (optional)

IDNEXT

Reference to the next element related to reading order.

If the shape of the element is not rectangular an element SHAPE might be added:

Polygons are coded as X,y x,y ... with different coordinate pairs separated by spaces.

Circles and ellipses are, although allowed in principle, not supported by some vendor tools like docWORKS. Instead, such shapes are represented as polygons with sufficient accuracy.

A TextBlock is divided into lines and those are divided into strings, spaces and hyphens:

Meaning of those tags:

TextBlock

A paragraph of text

TextLine

A line of text

String

A single word

SP

White space

HYP

Hyphenation characteristics

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Additional Attributes of the tags

Element	Attribute name	Description
TextBlock	language	ISO639-2 language character code
String	CONTENT	String content (word)
	SUBS_TYPE	HypPart1	If content is the first part of a hyphenated word, applies only for the last word of a line if it is hyphenated
		HypPart2	If content is the second part of a hyphenated word, applies only for the first word of a line if it is hyphenated
	SUBS_CONTENT	Complete content of a hyphenated word
	WC	Word Confidence: Confidence level of the OCR results for this string. A float value between 0 (unsure) and 1 (confident)
	CC	Confidence level of each character in that string. A list of numbers, one number between 0 (confident) and 9 (unsure) for each character
	STYLEREFS	Text style used for this string, if it is different from the parent text block style
	STYLE	Any combination of font style (italics, bold, …)
	ALTERNATIVE	(element) Any number of alternative strings to be used instead
Illustration	TYPE	A user defined description of the type of the illustration
	FILEID	A link to a seperate file that contains just the illustration.
ComposedBlock	TYPE	A user defined description of the type of the composed block
	FILEID	A link to a separate file that contains just the composed block