Alembic Workbench User's Guide

Parallel Tag File Format (PTF)

The Alembic Workbench recognizes a variety of different file formats, including SGML, HTML, and TEXT, and converts them to Parallel Tag File Format. As a step in this conversion, any markup found in the file is normalized, i.e., tested for compliance with the Document Type Definition (DTD) selected by the user. If non-compliant SGML markup is encountered, an informative error dialog is launched to apprise the user of any anomalies found. If the user elects to ignore the error message, the conversion process can be continued. The file is then converted to Parallel Tag File Format (PTF), which creates a document description file (denoted with the extension .dd) and distinct files (denoted with the extension .tag) that contain explicit markup data in the directory in which <filename> is located:


1. <filename>.norm
2. <filename>.norm.txt
3. <filename>.norm.dd
4. zero or more <filename>.norm.<annotation-type>.tag files



Table 2: File Extensions Created by PTF Conversion

File Extension	Description
.norm	The product of the normalization and pre-processing routines. This file contains normalized markup and optionally, text that has been converted according to pre-processing options selected by the user.
.norm.txt	The .norm file that has been stripped of markup.
.dd	The document description file
annotation-type.tag	The annotation file in which explicit tag data is stored separate from text text.



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