NWoodsman

This is an interesting snippet from your website, did this project intentionally start out as an attempt to design around a Turing machine? Or is it just safe to say that all languages executing on a stack with no heap are Turing machines?

The inventor of the Betterlight made limited number of the devices with an experimental large format CCD made by (Nikon? Canon?). He since passed away and there's a small community of owners desperate to keep their scanners operable, it's a near exinct tech. They allow for ~500 megapixel scans of artwork.

By placing studio lights above, shooting down, we capture the shadow and relief of the paint.

On a more philosophical level, the PDF has structure which is probably the most generalized structure across all domains: paragraphs of text on a page. Consider that most people barely know how to search a text file for a given word, and a minuscule percent of those people who know how to query a SQL database. People simply do not have the time or resources to learn a separate domain (data structure design and interaction) apart from their own domain. In other words, there's very few people who understand or even have motivation to use tools that provide exponential return on their time (such as manipulating/filtering/working with structured data). Time passes uniformly, and you typically receive no reward other than more work for learning tools to improve your own workflow.

Software engineers have long noticed that we can successfully create "models", "view models", and "views" of data that achieve the separation of concerns that you are seeking. A PDF is nothing more than a "view" of data, which has passed through a professional who has created a "view model" of that data (he/she decided how best to organize the data on to the page), and then you read the document and "parse" the data with your intellect. There is a lot of expertise and professionalism embedded in crafting paragraphs (or other graphical representations) that you can't discredit.

There is very little software options to treat generalized, domain-specific data in this three-step manner.

I.e.

      Poem->Verse->Line-> <char>

      Book->Page->Chapter->Paragraph->Sentence->Word-> <char>

      HTML->Body->Div->P-> <char>

Domain: Poetry, Value: Line

Domain: Book Object Model, Value: Word

Domain: HTML, Value: P Element

We could then ask any letter arbitrarily "what is your Font Style in your HTML context?" and it would be able to walk up the parent P which obtains its style from a CSS markup, and return that correctly. Or "What is your Poem's name in your Poetry context?" and it could recurse up to the Poem element to find it's Title.