computer science

Interleaf

Interleaf is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Interleaf rather than just read about it. In short: Interleaf, Inc. was a company that created computer software products for the technical publishing creation and distribution process. Founded in 1981, its initial product was the first commercial document processor that integrated text and graphics editing, producing WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") output at near-typeset quality.

Key takeaways

Interleaf belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Interleaf to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Interleaf from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Interleaf, Inc. was a company that created computer software products for the technical publishing creation and distribution process. Founded in 1981, its initial product was the first commercial document processor that integrated text and graphics editing, producing WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") output at near-typeset quality. It also had early products in the document management, electronic publishing, and Web publishing spaces. Interleaf's "Active Documents" functionality, integrated into its text and graphics editing products in the early 1990s, was the first to give document creators programmatic access (via LISP) to virtually all of the document's elements, structures, and software capabilities. Broadvision acquired Interleaf in January 2000, and Aurea Software Inc. acquired Broadvision in May 2020. Interleaf's headquarters was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, and later moved to Waltham, Massachusetts.

History Interleaf was founded by David Boucher and Harry George in 1981. Boucher served as chief executive officer from 1981 until 1992; George served as chief financial officer. Earlier, both were among the founders of Kurzweil Computer Products. Significant technology came from MIT's Office Automation Group led by Michael Hammer, a member of Interleaf's board of directors; Bahram (Bern) Niamir, who had been in that group, brought many ideas from its Etude system, a pioneering WYSIWYG editor. Other early personnel came from NBI, Inc. and Wang Labs. The company initially produced "turnkey" systems, that is, combinations of hardware and software integrated by the company. It initially ran on workstations from Sun Microsystems and Apollo Computers, but later ported its software to workstations made by Digital Equipment Corporation, HP, IBM and SGI, and later still, to the Apple Macintosh II and the IBM Personal Computer. Interleaf sold its first products in 1984-5. Inspired by the Xerox Star and Apple Lisa, TPS (Technical Publishing Software) uniquely enabled authors to write their text and create technical graphics on a computer screen that showed what the page would look like when formatted and printed on a laser printer. This capability was so unusual in 1985 that the company's name referred to the "interleaving" of text and graphics. WYSIWYG editing was also new, as existing typesetting systems were text-based and relied on user markup and batch processing to produce the end result. TPS was also noted for its ability to handle the sorts of long documents corporate technical publishing departments routinely created. Interleaf had its initial public offering (IPO) in June 1986, raising $24.6 million. In 1990, Interleaf moved from Cambridge to Waltham, MA. The company was bought by Broadvision in 2000, which renamed its authoring products "Quicksilver". The availability of Quicksilver 3.0 was announced in March 2007. The availability of QuickSilver 3.5 was announced in May 2010. QuickSilver 3.7 was released in July 2014. Quicksilver is currently sold and supported by Aurea Software, Inc.

Conversion There remain engineering companies and defense contractors that have their archives in the Interleaf/Quicksilver format, however in the 2000s it became increasingly difficult and expensive to maintain documents in that format, thus, established users of Quicksilver and the original Interleaf often seek to convert their documents to another format, usually Microsoft Word because of its ubiquity in large corporations. Because of the aging of the Interleaf/Quicksilver code, by the early 2000s there were few technical options to convert Interleaf/Quicksilver documents. One option is to retype the entire document manually. This is only cost effective using labor in countries with low labor costs like China and the Philippines, however, in any case, a manual conversion process has high risks of human contamination of data. Based on a web search, there appear to have been few software based, programmatic conversion services for Interleaf/Quicksilver. By 2023, we found only one such service in the marketplace: ZANDAR Corporation's TagWrite, that claims to have the ability to make precise, programmatic conversion of Interleaf/Quicksilver entirely in computer memory without human intervention.

Products

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Interleaf

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Interleaf claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Interleaf before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Interleaf ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Interleaf

In research: Interleaf appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Interleaf in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Interleaf is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Defunct companies based in Massachusetts, Defunct software companies of the United States, Software companies disestablished in 2000, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Interleaf outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Interleaf in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Interleaf means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Interleaf out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Interleaf in simple terms?

Why does Interleaf matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Interleaf?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Interleaf.