Putting large documents online

Large documents are among the most suitable documents for online viewing. This paper will look at the process of converting large printed documents to online documents. It will discuss the role of hypertext, SGML, and other technologies in their creation, This paper will then look at the process of designing large online documents from the traditional analyses of audience, task, and information to implementation concerns such as determining the design requirements, evaluating electronic publishing software and prototyping the design. Large documents are the most suitable for online viewing. They can be stored compactly on the system and they can be searched in ways not possible in their printed form using full text search retrieval methods or by making the underlying structure of the document accessible. An excellent example is the electronic version of the Oxford English Dictionary which has opened up areas of research for scholars that could not even be conceptualized in the past. The online dictionary equipped with a powerful search method and supported by SGML markup allows scholars to answer questions as “How many words came into the English language in the 17th century from German origin?” or “What words did Shakespeare coin?”