Page Interchange Language also known as Publishing Interchange Language, or "PIL" is a

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because those rights have expired, ...

language that allows precise description of the

layout Layout may refer to: * Page layout, the arrangement of visual elements on a page ** Comprehensive layout (comp), a proposed page layout presented by a designer to their client * Layout (computing), the process of calculating the position of ob ...

of content on pages, groups of multiple pages or any 2-dimensional area, which it calls a "canvas." It was developed between June 1990 and June 1991 by the ''Professional Publishers Interchange Specification Workgroup'', a committee of software and hardware vendors serving the newspaper, magazine and print advertising markets. The committee was led by

Quark A quark () is a type of elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei. All common ...

and

Atex The ATEX directives are two EU directives describing the minimum safety requirements for workplaces and equipment used in explosive atmospheres. The name is an initialization of the French term ''Appareils destinés à être utilisés en ATmo ...

. At the time, typesetting and physically cut and pasting of images was still required to assemble many pages because the specialized

composition Composition or Compositions may refer to: Arts and literature * Composition (dance), practice and teaching of choreography *Composition (language), in literature and rhetoric, producing a work in spoken tradition and written discourse, to include ...

pagination Pagination, also known as paging, is the process of dividing a document into discrete pages, either electronic pages or printed pages. In reference to books produced without a computer, pagination can mean the consecutive page numbering to indi ...

text formatting Typesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging physical ''type'' (or ''sort'') in mechanical systems or '' glyphs'' in digital systems representing '' characters'' (letters and other symbols).Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random ...

, and graphic design systems that produced the content could not operate together to produce integrated output. PIL was designed to allow electronic integration of content and layout, so that one system could print complete pages or layouts with all the typeset text and composed images that came from heterogeneous subsystems. PIL describes the layout, and allows the use of any combination of

markup language Markup language refers to a text-encoding system consisting of a set of symbols inserted in a text document to control its structure, formatting, or the relationship between its parts. Markup is often used to control the display of the document ...

s and

image formats An Image file format is a file format for a digital image. There are many formats that can be used, such as JPEG, PNG, and GIF. Most formats up until 2022 were for storing 2D images, not 3D ones. The data stored in an image file format may be c ...

to encode the content. It enables any publishing

workflow A workflow consists of an orchestrated and repeatable pattern of activity, enabled by the systematic organization of resources into processes that transform materials, provide services, or process information. It can be depicted as a sequence ...

of either sequential or simultaneous layout and content creation. PIL was successfully used to integrate many publishing systems including systems from Agfa,

, Autologic, Information International, Inc.,

Quark, Inc. Quark Software Inc. (founded 1981 in Denver, Colorado, USA) is a privately owned software company which specializes in enterprise publishing software for automating the production of customer communications. The company's original goal was to "c ...

, and

Scitex Suny Cellular Communication was known as Scitex Corporation Ltd. until December 2005 and Scailex Corporation Ltd. () until November 2016. History Scitex was an Israel-based multi-national company, founded by Efraim (Efi) Arazi in 1968, and ...

. Many languages and formats now exist to describe content for the World Wide Web, and to define documents by their logical structure, so the same content can be reformatted for multiple purposes. However, PIL exists to describe precisely a graphical design and the placement of all content within it. It is useful for those who want to define a specific visual presentation rather than the sort of fluid layout that a web browser allows. It does not directly provide any logical structure of elements such as headings, citations, captions and so on. It defines a (theoretically infinite) hierarchy of canvases with coordinate systems, tags, frames, and content of any type. These can be used as needed to draw any type of document. The complet
public domain distribution
of PIL includes the language specification document (including a BNF specification, example files, a programmer's guide, and C-language source code for a parser and an output engine to produce PIL. The source code is highly portable to any platform that supports C, either in the

ANSI C ANSI C, ISO C, and Standard C are successive standards for the C programming language published by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22/WG 14 of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and th ...

or earlier K&R forms.

External links

* Publishing Interchange Language

References

{{Reflist Page layout Programming languages created in 1991 Publishing software Public-domain software with source code