A document that runs itself is what a screen in a reception area, a trade stand or a waiting room actually needs: no presentation software to install, no licence on the machine, nobody to click anything. The file is the show, and it plays on whatever is standing there, because every machine already opens PDF files.
Each slide here names the effect that brings it in, how long that effect takes and how long the slide then stands, and prints all three on itself — so what you watch can be checked against what was asked for. The first page arrives plainly, and the thirteen after it carry one effect each. Open it in reading software that allows full screen to see them run.
Nothing is left out and nothing is simplified: this is the program exactly as it runs, for the developer who uses this library. The third is the description itself: a plain list of what the page has to say, which is what the service is sent.
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Four pages that say how they want to be opened: which page comes up and how much of the window it fills, the chapters beside it, the pages two at a time, a print dialog already filled in — every one of them a wish reading software answers for itself.
A document made to be followed rather than looked at: every line of the contents lands on the page it names, and every page leads back to where it came from.
Links and marks hung on text the engine has already placed: a band behind a line, an underline, a boxed cell — every rectangle taken from what the layout and the table report afterwards, none of it measured by hand.
Pages numbered by their labels rather than their position.
Two stories over two pages: each one begins in a column of the front page and carries on in a column of the second, and the two swap sides on the way. The file says which column follows which, so reading software goes on with the story it is on.
One pattern that states no colour of its own, laid down in five colours and in five strengths of one press ink: the fill says what colour to lay it down in. Beside them, the same hatch made of patterns that carry their own colours, which is one pattern per colour.
