Public Access to Legislation Project
Technical issues and their resolution
Customisation and integration of E3
An E3 print rendering engine has been selected as the tool to transform legislation prior to its publication. Unisys has experienced difficulty in customising that E3 engine and integrating it into the overall PAL system. This issue has been resolved, with the assistance of representatives from PTC/Arbortext, who are the suppliers of E3.
Line numbering in PDFs
Custom code had to be developed by Unisys to enable line numbers to be produced in PDF files.
Link management
The PAL system includes a tool to manage cross-references within and between legislative documents. This tool is essential to allow users of the website to navigate using hypertext links. However, link management tools designed for technical documents do not easily cope with the large number of potential link targets and links that are contained within legislative documents.
Unisys selected DLM as the link management tool for use in the PAL system, because it is designed to work with the other PTC/Arbortext tools selected (E3, PrintComposer, and Epic Editor). DLM is a relatively new product in the PTC/Arbortext suite and there have been some technical and performance issues associated with its usage across a collection of legislative documents.
Unisys has worked closely with representatives from PTC/Arbortext to resolve these issues. Some significant gains in performance have been obtained by fragmenting documents into smaller pieces when registering targets and links in DLM.
Screen rendering performance
Performance issues have been encountered in the PAL system authoring tool when rendering documents on screen during editing. Delays occurred between a user entering a command on the keyboard and the result appearing on screen.
PTC/Arbortext representatives have worked closely with Unisys to identify potential causes of those delays, and a number of factors have been identified. Those factors include a general performance drop between the version of Epic Editor that was used for the proof of concept and the implementation version, the use of automatically generated text in documents, the complexity of the stylesheets that are required to format legislation, and the way that the formatting rules have been written in those stylesheets. Solutions to the performance issues that are currently being trialled include reducing the amount of automatically generated text, and rewriting some of the formatting rules.
Print rendering performance
There have also been performance issues relating to the speed at which print renditions are being produced. Again a number of potential factors have been identified through consultation between Unisys and PTC/Arbortext, and solutions are currently being trialled.
In addition, the potential for a bottleneck in the queue to the E3 print rendering engine has been identified. To avoid this, it has been proposed that members of PCO's pre-publication team render legislation that is ready for publication using the server-based E3 rendering engine, while other staff use desktop-based print composer licences to print and preview draft legislation.
Integration of products into user interface/webservices layer
The integration of third party products into a custom-built user interface and webservices layer has proved to be a complex task that has taken longer than was originally anticipated.