How are software such as MS Office Word, OpenOffice Writer and the like, render the page?

Question

I have looked at every single documentation I can get my hands on but I just can't seem to work out how the paper of MS Word like application is contextualised as a page and then able to save, open and print (to paper or pdf etc).

I have looked at OpenGL but that seems to use some sort of atlas to grab the characters. Is it not possible to store them as individual ascii characters?

Any help would be appreciated

Thank you

Zana

Answer 1

For any text document, I assume that there is a string of characters that is coded according to one of the standard methods (ascii, unicode, etc.) The list of characters includes simple things like spaces, "newline" or "return". In the simplest case any formatting is done with the available characters.

Then, there is a layer of formatting information. This can be any number of things, including open standards such as HTML or XML, or any of the many proprietary formats.

In all cases, the file is nothing more than a string of digital "words"--normally either 8 or 16 bits each. To read the file, a computer must be told how to interpret each value.

In addition to the formatting information, a typical file for a text document will include information about the file including things like the author, revision date, etc. and any pictures or diagrams. All of this follows the rules established for the format in use.