About This Issue...

The article presents an overview of the September 1982 issue of the journal "ACM Computing Surveys." The author says that information stored in a computer includes numerical, textual, and graphical information. Such information can be collected and ordered for presentation to the computer user. Ordered collections of information entities, such as textual paragraphs, graphical line drawings, or numerical tables, are called documents. Researchers Norman Meyrowitz and Andries van Dam delineate and illustrate the process of interactive editing. Their paper covers editing tasks that modify the textual entities used either in a manuscript or in a computer program. Document-formatting systems are concerned with the physical layout of a document for portrayal either on a computer display screen or on hard copy. The paper by Richard Furuta, Jeffrey Scofield, and Alan Shaw examines these formatting systems from a variety of perspectives. Cache memories are used to temporarily hold those portions of the contents of main memory which are believed to be currently in use.