dataActive™ technology has invested nine years of research, development and real world testing into the creation of it’s current document rendering platform. Our work has yielded a mature page layout engine that offers advanced typographical controls, multi-lingual support and precise object positioning.

The re:ality engine utilises it's own XML dialect for describing page layouts known as 're:ality Markup Language' (or RML). The ideology behind RML is simplicity. Breaking away from existing content description languages, RML describes page elements in their most simplest forms. Everything rendered by the re:ality engine can be defined in terms of pages, layers, paragraphs, images, tables and charts. Even the most complex documents can be built from these basic building blocks. In our experience RML is both easy to learn and easy to use.

The re:ality XML file format is designed to promote the separation between content and formatting. A powerful and flexible cascading style sheet mechanism augments the basic page elements to provide the user with fine and structured control of a document's look and feel. Colours, fonts and styles can be abstracted away from the data content so that radically different document layouts can be realised swiftly from the same source data. Style sheets can be isolated and maintained independently from business data promoting reuse and delegation of responsibility within development teams. Unlike other technologies, re:ality does not force the user to generalise or standardise their designs for automation − if you really want to make that second word on the fourth line appear in bold, re:ality offers you that freedom.

Harnessing the same core technologies of the page layout engine, re:ality also offers a graphing engine that can turn dry, unexciting blocks of statistical data into vibrant, eye-catching illustrations. The two-dimensional graphics sub-system offers smooth curves, clean lines and anti-aliased fonts. Base support is provided for standard line, bar and pie charts offering a high level of customisation to tailor their representation to your specific needs. Best of all, the graphing sub-system is an open and extensible framework meaning we can swiftly add support for entirely new types and styles of graph in the unlikely event that the base charts are not sufficient for your business’ unique requirements.

re:ality implements an entirely vector-based rendering process that maintains mathematically defined representations of all elements on the rendered page. This means that all regions of a document can be scaled losslessly, and printed at maximum resolution. To maintain this perfect level of quality from producer to printer, our rendering engine outputs all documents in industry standard Portable Document Format (PDF). re:ality includes full support for both spot colour and four-colour process rendering essential for volume, high-quality press-production. It also allows seamless incorporation of existing assets into new documents via import support for lossless formats such as PDF and encapsulated PostScript as well as bitmap graphics such as JPEG, TIFF and PNG.