Interleaf
Encyclopedia
Founded in 1981, Interleaf was a company that created software products for the technical publishing creation and distribution process. Its initial product was the first commercial document processor
that integrated text and graphics editing, producing WYSIWYG
("what you see is what you get") output at near-typeset quality. It also had early products in the document management, electronic publishing, and Web publishing spaces. Interleaf's "Active Documents" functionality, integrated into its text and graphics editing products in the early 1990s, was the first to give document creators programmatic access (via LISP
) to virtually all of the document's elements, structures, and software capabilities.
Broadvision
acquired Interleaf in January 2000. The latest version of the publishing software (i.e. TPS) is called QuickSilver.
Interleaf's headquarters was in Cambridge, Massachusetts
and later moved to Waltham, Massachusetts
.
and Harry George in 1981. Boucher served as chief executive officer from 1981 until 1992; George served as chief financial officer. Earlier, both were among the founders of Kurzweil Computer Products. Other early personnel came from NBI and Wang Labs. The company initially produced "turnkey" systems, that is, combinations of hardware and software integrated by the company. It initially ran on workstations from Sun Microsystems
and Apollo Computers, but later ported its software to workstations made by Digital Equipment Corporation
, HP, IBM
and SGI
, and later still, to the Apple Macintosh II and the IBM personal computer.
Interleaf released its first product in 1985. Inspired by the Xerox Star
and Apple Lisa
, TPS (Technical Publishing Software) uniquely enabled authors to write their text and create technical graphics on a computer screen that showed what the page would look like when formatted and printed on a laser printer
. Although modern word processors routinely allow that, at the time this capability was so unusual that the company's name referred to the "interleaving" of text and graphics. TPS was also noted for its ability to handle the sorts of long documents corporate technical publishing departments routinely created.
Interleaf had its initial public offering
(IPO) in June, 1986, raising $24.6 million.
In 1990, Interleaf moved from Cambridge, MA, to Waltham, MA.
The company was bought by Broadvision
in 2000, which renamed its authoring products "Quicksilver." The availability of Quicksilver 3.0 was announced in March, 2007.
The availabilty of QuickSilver 3.5 was announced in May, 2010.
TPS was a structured document editor. That is, it internally treated a document as a set of element classes, each with its own set of properties. Classes might include common document elements such as a body, paragraphs, titles, subheadings, captions, etc. Authors were free to create any set of elements and save them as a reusable template. The properties of a class — its font size, for example — could be changed and automatically applied to every instance of that class. If this caused a change in pagination — increasing the font size could change where the page breaks were — the software would update the screen quickly enough for the author to continue typing, including altering all of the cross-references that the author may have inserted; this WYSIWYG capability was a competitive advantage for the company. The structured nature of the documents also enabled TPS to provide conditional document assembly, a feature that enabled users to "tag" document elements with metadata
about them, and then automatically assemble versions of the document based upon those tags. For example, an aircraft manufacturer might tag paragraphs with the model number of the planes to which they applied and then assemble versions of the documentation specific to each model.
The fact that it created structured documents enabled Interleaf to add its Active Document capabilities in the early 1990s. Just as JavaScript
enables contemporary software developers to add functionality and "intelligence" to Web documents, Interleaf used LISP to enable document authors and engineers to enhance its authoring electronic publishing systems. Any document element could be given new "methods
" (capabilities), and could respond to changes in the content or structure of the document itself. Typical applications included documents that automatically generated and updated charts based upon data expressed in the document, pages that altered themselves based on data accessed data databases or other sources, and systems that dynamically created pages to guide users through complex processes such as filling out insurance forms.
to manage the elements of complex document sets, including their versions. Team of authors and editors would "check in" their documents when done with a work session, and begin a new session by "checking them out." In so doing, RDM would ensure that the authors were working on the most current version of the document, even if another author had worked on it in the interim.
and other Portable Document Format
(PDF) viewers, although Worldview preceded by a year the introduction of Acrobat in 1993. Worldview allowed document sets created with Interleaf's technical publishing tools to be viewed on workstations, Macintoshes, and PCs, retaining page fidelity, and including hyperlinks among the pages.
WorldView was brain-child of Kirk Reistroffer an Interleaf Fellow
, PostScript
, TIFF and SGML. Using Interleaf's technical publishing system's ability to reformat documents rapidly, Worldview Press enabled the creation of documents formatted for particular delivery vehicles. For example, the same documents could be formatted for reading on a small laptop screen or for a large workstation's monitor. WorldView Press, developed in Lisp, was conceived and implemented by Jim Giza
became increasingly adopted as the preferred mechanism for distributing electronic documents, Interleaf added Cyberleaf, a version of the WorldView Press that produced HTML documents. BYTE Magazine Editors Choice Award in 1995
Bill O'Donnell was the designer and developer of Cyberleaf. Later versions were worked on by Brenda White.
became a major competitor.
In the document management area, Interleaf competed with Documentum
.
In the electronic distribution area, Adobe Acrobat
, launched after Interleaf Worldview, became the dominant software.
Document processor
A document processor is a document preparation system that superficially resembles a word processor. However, the emphasis in a document processor is on the arrangement of the document's components, not the formatting of the characters that compose it...
that integrated text and graphics editing, producing WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed onscreen during editing appears in a form closely corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product...
("what you see is what you get") output at near-typeset quality. It also had early products in the document management, electronic publishing, and Web publishing spaces. Interleaf's "Active Documents" functionality, integrated into its text and graphics editing products in the early 1990s, was the first to give document creators programmatic access (via LISP
Lisp
A lisp is a speech impediment, historically also known as sigmatism. Stereotypically, people with a lisp are unable to pronounce sibilants , and replace them with interdentals , though there are actually several kinds of lisp...
) to virtually all of the document's elements, structures, and software capabilities.
Broadvision
Broadvision
BroadVision is an international software vendor of self service web applications for enterprise social software, electronic commerce, Enterprise Portals, CRM....
acquired Interleaf in January 2000. The latest version of the publishing software (i.e. TPS) is called QuickSilver.
Interleaf's headquarters was in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
and later moved to Waltham, Massachusetts
Waltham, Massachusetts
Waltham is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, was an early center for the labor movement, and major contributor to the American Industrial Revolution. The original home of the Boston Manufacturing Company, the city was a prototype for 19th century industrial city planning,...
.
History
Interleaf was founded by David BoucherDavid Boucher
David Boucher is a professional French road cyclist, currently riding for Omega Pharma-Lotto.-Palmarès:2004200520092010-References:* at Omega Pharma-Lotto...
and Harry George in 1981. Boucher served as chief executive officer from 1981 until 1992; George served as chief financial officer. Earlier, both were among the founders of Kurzweil Computer Products. Other early personnel came from NBI and Wang Labs. The company initially produced "turnkey" systems, that is, combinations of hardware and software integrated by the company. It initially ran on workstations from Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
and Apollo Computers, but later ported its software to workstations made by Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
, HP, IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
and SGI
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
, and later still, to the Apple Macintosh II and the IBM personal computer.
Interleaf released its first product in 1985. Inspired by the Xerox Star
Xerox Star
The Star workstation, officially known as the Xerox 8010 Information System, was introduced by Xerox Corporation in 1981. It was the first commercial system to incorporate various technologies that today have become commonplace in personal computers, including a bitmapped display, a window-based...
and Apple Lisa
Apple Lisa
The Apple Lisa—also known as the Lisa—is a :personal computer designed by Apple Computer, Inc. during the early 1980s....
, TPS (Technical Publishing Software) uniquely enabled authors to write their text and create technical graphics on a computer screen that showed what the page would look like when formatted and printed on a laser printer
Laser printer
A laser printer is a common type of computer printer that rapidly produces high quality text and graphics on plain paper. As with digital photocopiers and multifunction printers , laser printers employ a xerographic printing process, but differ from analog photocopiers in that the image is produced...
. Although modern word processors routinely allow that, at the time this capability was so unusual that the company's name referred to the "interleaving" of text and graphics. TPS was also noted for its ability to handle the sorts of long documents corporate technical publishing departments routinely created.
Interleaf had its initial public offering
Initial public offering
An initial public offering or stock market launch, is the first sale of stock by a private company to the public. It can be used by either small or large companies to raise expansion capital and become publicly traded enterprises...
(IPO) in June, 1986, raising $24.6 million.
In 1990, Interleaf moved from Cambridge, MA, to Waltham, MA.
The company was bought by Broadvision
Broadvision
BroadVision is an international software vendor of self service web applications for enterprise social software, electronic commerce, Enterprise Portals, CRM....
in 2000, which renamed its authoring products "Quicksilver." The availability of Quicksilver 3.0 was announced in March, 2007.
The availabilty of QuickSilver 3.5 was announced in May, 2010.
TPS
TPS (later renamed to "Interleaf 5," up through "Interleaf 7") was an integrated, networked text-and-graphics document creation system initially designed for technical publishing departments. Versions after its first release in 1984 added instantaneous updating of page numbering and reference numbers through multi-chapter and multi-volumes sets, increased graphics capabilities, automatic index and table of content generation, hyphenation, equations, "microdocuments" that recursively allowed fully functional whole document elements to be embedded in any document, and the ability to program any element of a document (a capability the company called "Active Documents"). Interleaf software was available in many languages including Japanese text layout.TPS was a structured document editor. That is, it internally treated a document as a set of element classes, each with its own set of properties. Classes might include common document elements such as a body, paragraphs, titles, subheadings, captions, etc. Authors were free to create any set of elements and save them as a reusable template. The properties of a class — its font size, for example — could be changed and automatically applied to every instance of that class. If this caused a change in pagination — increasing the font size could change where the page breaks were — the software would update the screen quickly enough for the author to continue typing, including altering all of the cross-references that the author may have inserted; this WYSIWYG capability was a competitive advantage for the company. The structured nature of the documents also enabled TPS to provide conditional document assembly, a feature that enabled users to "tag" document elements with metadata
Metadata
The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...
about them, and then automatically assemble versions of the document based upon those tags. For example, an aircraft manufacturer might tag paragraphs with the model number of the planes to which they applied and then assemble versions of the documentation specific to each model.
The fact that it created structured documents enabled Interleaf to add its Active Document capabilities in the early 1990s. Just as JavaScript
JavaScript
JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
enables contemporary software developers to add functionality and "intelligence" to Web documents, Interleaf used LISP to enable document authors and engineers to enhance its authoring electronic publishing systems. Any document element could be given new "methods
Method (computer programming)
In object-oriented programming, a method is a subroutine associated with a class. Methods define the behavior to be exhibited by instances of the associated class at program run time...
" (capabilities), and could respond to changes in the content or structure of the document itself. Typical applications included documents that automatically generated and updated charts based upon data expressed in the document, pages that altered themselves based on data accessed data databases or other sources, and systems that dynamically created pages to guide users through complex processes such as filling out insurance forms.
Interleaf Relational Document Manager (RDM)
RDM was an early document management product, acquired in the late 1980s and then integrated with Interleaf's other products. RDM used a relational database management systemRelational database management system
A relational database management system is a database management system that is based on the relational model as introduced by E. F. Codd. Most popular databases currently in use are based on the relational database model....
to manage the elements of complex document sets, including their versions. Team of authors and editors would "check in" their documents when done with a work session, and begin a new session by "checking them out." In so doing, RDM would ensure that the authors were working on the most current version of the document, even if another author had worked on it in the interim.
Interleaf WorldView
Interleaf Worldview's core functionality is familiar to users of Adobe AcrobatAdobe Acrobat
Adobe Acrobat is a family of application software developed by Adobe Systems to view, create, manipulate, print and manage files in Portable Document Format . All members of the family, except Adobe Reader , are commercial software, while the latter is available as freeware and can be downloaded...
and other Portable Document Format
Portable Document Format
Portable Document Format is an open standard for document exchange. This file format, created by Adobe Systems in 1993, is used for representing documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems....
(PDF) viewers, although Worldview preceded by a year the introduction of Acrobat in 1993. Worldview allowed document sets created with Interleaf's technical publishing tools to be viewed on workstations, Macintoshes, and PCs, retaining page fidelity, and including hyperlinks among the pages.
WorldView was brain-child of Kirk Reistroffer an Interleaf Fellow
Interleaf WorldView Press
Worldview Press prepared documents for online viewing via Worldview. It imported documents created not only with Interleaf's systems but by the other major document creation and graphic systems of the time, including Microsoft WordMicrosoft Word
Microsoft Word is a word processor designed by Microsoft. It was first released in 1983 under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS , the Apple Macintosh , the AT&T Unix PC , Atari ST , SCO UNIX,...
, PostScript
PostScript
PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. It is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. Adobe PostScript 3 is also the worldwide printing and imaging...
, TIFF and SGML. Using Interleaf's technical publishing system's ability to reformat documents rapidly, Worldview Press enabled the creation of documents formatted for particular delivery vehicles. For example, the same documents could be formatted for reading on a small laptop screen or for a large workstation's monitor. WorldView Press, developed in Lisp, was conceived and implemented by Jim Giza
Interleaf Cyberleaf
As the World Wide WebWorld Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
became increasingly adopted as the preferred mechanism for distributing electronic documents, Interleaf added Cyberleaf, a version of the WorldView Press that produced HTML documents. BYTE Magazine Editors Choice Award in 1995
Bill O'Donnell was the designer and developer of Cyberleaf. Later versions were worked on by Brenda White.
Competitors
In the technical authoring and publishing area, FramemakerFrameMaker
Adobe FrameMaker is a document processor for the production and manipulation of large structured documents. It is produced by Adobe Systems. Although FrameMaker has evolved slowly in recent years, it maintains a strong following among professional technical writers.- Overview :FrameMaker has more...
became a major competitor.
In the document management area, Interleaf competed with Documentum
Documentum
Documentum is an enterprise content management platform, now delivered by EMC Corporation, as well as the name of the software company that originally developed the technology. EMC acquired Documentum for $1.7 billion in December, 2003...
.
In the electronic distribution area, Adobe Acrobat
Adobe Acrobat
Adobe Acrobat is a family of application software developed by Adobe Systems to view, create, manipulate, print and manage files in Portable Document Format . All members of the family, except Adobe Reader , are commercial software, while the latter is available as freeware and can be downloaded...
, launched after Interleaf Worldview, became the dominant software.