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5. Future System

5.1 Future Plan

The results of the current implementation are browsing of the Japanese Parliament documents information on operating systems of various languages and outputting of Japanese documents formatted in PDF.  For the future plan, the following investigations are necessary: expanding support languages for Web browsing; expanding the support operating systems; and inputting the supported languages into Web.  In addition, in order to have accurate communication, the system must be able to handle the documents formatted in PDF by input and output of various languages.

First of all, in order to handle the various languages on the Web, we must supply fonts.  Technical, however, the problem is already solved.  In addition to Japanese, font has been developed for Chinese (GB, Big5), Hangul, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Thai.  Therefore, the technical problem has been solved.  For other languages, if the character code is established, development of font is feasible.  However, there are some languages which do not have correspondence between the character code and font.  In such a case, the early solution will be difficult.

For the operating system, the current system was developed for Window 95 as a basis.  We do not expect any problems for English, Chinese, Korean and Japanese operating systems.  It is possible to extend to Window 3.1, NT and 98.  For other languages, the sufficient testing has not been conducted. However, we do not expect major problems.  There is no plan for non-Windows operating system.

It is desirable to have a bi-directional Web.  In some cases, it is necessary to have response to questionnaire, to register, and to input the search inputs.  The development of a virtual keyboard, such as input using a mouse on the display, may be necessary to support such requirements.

PDF has some possibility to establish the more precise communication as a document than Web.  However, it is necessary to solve the distribution problem over Web along with problems of font and operating systems of different languages.

Future development is expected to bring more results.

5.2 Subsystem B

The expressing possibility of HTML documents in Sub system A could be quite low, depending on character code systems. Moreover, especially in the countries in which "Kanji" is used, users usually have to use not only normal character sets, but also some other character sets. Accordingly, Sub system A has a limit.

Sub system B is adopted to solve the above problems.

Basically, Sub system B is an embedded font-type portable document file system. This system reformats data which was formatted without any dependence on applications. Also, it can restore the documents as sender formatted. Additionally, because the document itself has font sets, even in the case of non-standard fonts (gaiji) or special fonts, Sub system B can reproduce the format style perfectly.

In the Sub system, the document data of the sending country has to be formatted in portable document file format. Moreover, the receiving country has to prepare a tool which can open the file (we will call this tool the "portable document reader").

Therefore, to use the sub system B, users need the following tools.