US 6,012,071 AGranted

Distributed electronic publishing system

AssigneeFutureTense, Inc.

InventorsB. C. Krishna, Julie Melbin, Daniel E. Latham

Life of this patent

Estimating the term…

Abstract

A design and layout tool defines regions within an electronic publication and provides instructions to a viewer for obtaining and formatting information to be displayed by the viewer within each region. The viewer may execute on a client computer system connected to a computer network. The viewer obtains information, pursuant to the instructions, from one or more server computer systems that are also connected to the computer network and displays the information to a user. The viewer is also responsive to user interactions and timer events to obtain and display the information. The design and layout tool may also generate secure font file names for the fonts associated with the information to be displayed by the viewer.

Claims23

Dependent claims

A distributed system for displaying an electronic publication, the system comprising a first computer called a client, a second computer called a server, and a computer network interconnecting the client and the server, wherein:

(a) the server stores a publication outline file, the publication outline file defining a layout of the electronic publication such that the electronic publication contains at least one region, and for each region, the publication outline file containing formatting instructions for how to format information displayed within each region, the formatting instructions including at least a name of a font file containing fonts to be used in displaying text content information within the corresponding region, as well as locating instructions for how to locate content information for each respective region, the content information being stored in a file separately from the formatting instructions in a content file different from the publication outline file, and upon request from the client, the server sends the publication outline file to the client;
and
(b) the client executes an application program to obtain the publication outline file, and for at least one region defined therein, to obtain the content information by following the respective locating instructions to locate the content file to obtain the content information stored therein, and to determine whether a specified font file by the formatting instructions is already stored locally at the client, and if not, to download the specified font file to the client and using the specified font file in a manner such that if another program requests a list of installed fonts the specified font file appears to not be installed at the client, to format the content information according to the respective formatting instructions, including formatting text content information using the specified font file, and then to display the formatted content information at the client.

A method for displaying an electronic publication in a distributed computing environment comprising the steps of:

at a server computer,
(a) storing a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) page file, the HTML page file containing an applet tag, the applet tag including a first Uniform Resource Locator (URL) for a viewer program file, and a second URL for a publication file containing formatting instructions for at least one region in the electronic publication, and the publication file itself containing at least a third URL for a content file containing content information for the at least one region;
(b) providing the HTML page file to a client upon request by that client;
at a client computer,
(c) requesting the server computer to download the HTML page file;
(d) reading the applet tag contained in the HTML page file to determine the location of the viewer program file and then downloading the viewer program file as needed;
and
(e) executing the viewer program file to perform the steps of
(i) downloading the publication file specified by the second URL;
(ii) obtaining content information by downloading the content file specified by the third URL;
and
(iii) formatting and displaying the content information so obtained from the content file according to the formatting instructions obtained from the publication file.

9 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

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Abstract

(a) the server stores a publication outline file, the publication outline file defining a layout of the electronic publication such that the electronic publication contains at least one region, and for each region, the publication outline file containing formatting instructions for how to format information displayed within each region, the formatting instructions including at least a name of a font file containing fonts to be used in displaying text content information within the corresponding region, as well as locating instructions for how to locate content information for each respective region, the content information being stored in a file separately from the formatting instructions in a content file different from the publication outline file, and upon request from the client, the server sends the publication outline file to the client;
and
(b) the client executes an application program to obtain the publication outline file, and for at least one region defined therein, to obtain the content information by following the respective locating instructions to locate the content file to obtain the content information stored therein, and to determine whether a specified font file by the formatting instructions is already stored locally at the client, and if not, to download the specified font file to the client and using the specified font file in a manner such that if another program requests a list of installed fonts the specified font file appears to not be installed at the client, to format the content information according to the respective formatting instructions, including formatting text content information using the specified font file, and then to display the formatted content information at the client.