Method and apparatus for reading multi-page electronic documents
First Claim
1. A method for reading a page of a multi-page electronic document having page offset information, the method comprising:
- reading the page offset information hints early during reading of the document, the range offset information being optional information added to the document to optimize operations;
receiving a request to read a specific page of the document, the document having appearance-defining elements defining the appearance of the specific page, the elements being stored in the document in a non-contiguous manner;
finding the non-contiguous elements of the specific page in the document using the page offset information that was read early during reading of the document; and
reading the appearance-defining elements defining the appearance of the specific page.
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Abstract
A method and apparatus for providing an optimized page-based electronic document file and downloading the optimized file. An optimized document file is created from a non-optimized electronic document. Page contents are contiguously written in the optimized file and a page offset table is provided in the optimized file that includes page offset information used to locate individual pages and objects of the document. Shared objects, such as fonts, are included in the file after the page contents. When downloading the optimized file from a host, the page offset information is read early and is used to download a specific page requested by the user without downloading other pages in the document. In one embodiment, a viewer downloads a first portion of the requested page, while all remaining portions of the requested page are located and requested by a finder process using the page offset table. In alternative embodiments, all objects for a full page may be requested at once. The requested page can thus be downloaded with only one connection to the host. Shared objects can optionally be downloaded interleaved between portions of the page contents that reference the shared objects. Alternatively, with the use of hint tables, shared and other objects can be read in one transaction identifying byte ranges in the document. The requested page is displayed to the user on an output display device. The order elements are displayed provides quick access to useful information and to active elements.
331 Citations
27 Claims
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1. A method for reading a page of a multi-page electronic document having page offset information, the method comprising:
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reading the page offset information hints early during reading of the document, the range offset information being optional information added to the document to optimize operations; receiving a request to read a specific page of the document, the document having appearance-defining elements defining the appearance of the specific page, the elements being stored in the document in a non-contiguous manner; finding the non-contiguous elements of the specific page in the document using the page offset information that was read early during reading of the document; and reading the appearance-defining elements defining the appearance of the specific page. - View Dependent Claims (8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26)
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2. A method for reading an electronic document containing a set of objects, each object belonging to one of a set of classes, the document also containing a hint table for each class in the set of classes, each hint table containing information identifying the locations of objects in the corresponding class, the method comprising the steps of:
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reading the hint tables early during the reading process; using a hint table to identify the locations in the document of objects of the corresponding class; and using the identified locations to create a transaction to read all or a specified subset of the objects of the corresponding class, whereby any aspect of the document related to a class of information desired by the user can be read without the necessity of reading objects relating to other aspects of the document. - View Dependent Claims (3, 4, 5, 6, 7)
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27. Apparatus comprising a computer-readable storage medium tangibly embodying computer program instructions comprising instructions to:
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read page offset information located at a predetermined location in a document; read shared object hints from the document; using the page offset information hints and the shared object hints read from the document, locate a first portion of page content of a page of the document, a second portion of page content of the page of the document, and a shared object in the document, the first portion of page content including a reference to the shared object; read the located first portion of page content; read the located shared object; and read the located second portion of page content.
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Specification