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Document Content Architecture

The Document Content Architecture (DCA) was created by IBM in the early 1980s. It encodes documents as EBCDIC bytes, a format common on mainframe computers. Structural and formatting information is represented in no less than five ways. Even with this unnecessary complexity, DCA is still unable to represent graphics, typefaces (aside from a few standards), equations, etc. Text is represented in a relative fashion; like a typewriter all motion is given as an offset from the current position.


© 1993-2000 Christopher Keep, Tim McLaughlin, Robin Parmar.
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