Documents are not just for printing

Modern use has emphasized the written/printed nature of documents to the extent that today documents imply writing on paper. This trend is well reflected by document processing systems that can produce high quality paper output. The world of electronic documents currently abounds with a plethora of markup languages, document encodings, and typesetting systems designed to facilitate the production of visual documents. In the process, the principal function of the document as a vehicle of information has been overlooked. al is to generate audio documents with little extra effort from the same electronic source used to produce visual documents. The principle focus of this paper is the high-level representations that we need in order to generate audio documents. Capturing two-dimensional document content, such as mathematical formulae, and rendering it in audio forms a major part of our work. An audio document generated from the electronic source used to typeset this printed copy is available.