XFA Specification
Glossary
merge — picture clause (pattern)
994
Localized date or time formats cannot be used as
date or time picture clauses (picture
(pattern)).
In some locales, localized date or time
formats are identical to their picture clause
counterparts; however, this similarity is not
consistent across locales. For example, en_US
might use MM/DD/YY as both a picture clause and
a localized date format. In contrast, the fr_CA
locale might use a localized date format of aa/nn/jj
as the counterpart to the MM/DD/YY picture
clause.
nominal extent does not
necessarily
include the
whole physical extent of a visible object or, in the
case of a container, its contents.
normalizing the Data DOM
A process optionally performed by XFA processing
applications to move data nodes around to
reconcile data-binding contradictions. An example
of such a contradiction is a data node being bound
to a form node, even though the nearest
merge-able ancestor of the data node and the
nearest merge-able ancestor of the form node are
not bound to each other.
“Re-Normalization (Step
4)” on page 177.
M
merge
The data-binding process is sometimes called the
“merge” process because it can be thought of as
merging content from the Data DOM with
structure from the Template DOM to create a
single document, the Form DOM. However it
should be noted that it is possible to perform a
data binding operation without a Data DOM, in
which case the Form DOM gets its content from
default data in the Template DOM.
metadata
In this specification, “metadata” refers to data
expressed via XML attributes.
mixed content
XML elements that contain character data
interspersed with XML child elements constitute
“mixed content”. See the description of mixed
content within section “3.2.2 Mixed Content” of
the XML specification [XML].
O
output formatting
The process of transforming a raw value into a
formatted value, under the direction of a picture
clause. This term is the inverse of
input parsing.
P
page area
A description of a rendering surface, such as one
side of a printed page or a screen-display.
page set
An XFA element used to represent a set of display
surfaces, such as a stack of sheets of paper. For
example, a page set for a duplex document would
nominally consist of two page areas: a front page
area and a back page area. In another example, a
page set for an invoice might consist of three page
areas: a first page bearing a letter, followed by
alternating statement-front and statement-back
pages.
PDF subassembly
An unit of content added to the top level of a PDF
document tree. Examples of PDF subassemblies
are annots, data, and signature.
picture clause (pattern)
A sequence of symbols (characters) that specify
the rules for formatting and parsing textual data,
such as dates, times, numbers and text. Each
N
node
An object linked to other objects within a
hierarchical structure. In XFA the hierarchical
structure is always one of a predefined set of DOMs
(Document Object Models). All objects specified in
XFA are nodes.
nominal extent
The nominal extent of an object is a rectangle
aligned with the X and Y axes that covers the
region on the page reserved for the object. The