Reengineering PDF-Based Documents Targeting Complex Software Specifications

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to reengineer complex PDF documents, like OMG specifications, into more usable, structured, and navigable formats to improve user experience and facilitate understanding.

Contribution

It introduces a general approach for extracting logical structures from complex PDFs and creating multilayer hypertext versions, applicable beyond just OMG specifications.

Findings

Successfully extracted logical structures in XML format

Created multilayer hypertext for easier navigation

Applicable to various complex document types

Abstract

This article aims at reengineering of PDF-based complex documents, where specifications of the Object Management Group (OMG) are our initial targets. Our motivation is that such specifications are dense and intricate to use, and tend to have complicated structures. Our objective is therefore to create an approach that allows us to reengineer PDF-based documents, and to illustrate how to make more usable versions of electronic documents (such as specifications, technical books, etc) so that end users to have a better experience with them. The first step was to extract the logical structure of the document in a meaningful XML format for subsequent processing. Our initial assumption was that, many key concepts of a document are expressed in this structure. In the next phase, we created a multilayer hypertext version of the document to facilitate browsing and navigating. Although we initially focused on OMG software specifications, we chose a general approach for different phases of our work including format conversions, logical structure extraction, text extraction, multilayer hypertext generation, and concept exploration. As a consequence, we can process other complex documents to achieve our goals.