Patent Document ID: 6105044
Application ID: 09353262

Base Claim:
1. A method of producing a digital form of a portion of a hierarchical digital document, the digital document having descriptive markup defining a plurality of hierarchical elements, wherein each element has a type name, and has at least one of an ancestor element, a child element, a left sibling element, a right sibling element and unformatted text content, the method using a representation of the digital document, including, for each element, an indication of any ancestor element, child element, and left and right sibling element, the method comprising: sending a request for a portion of the digital document using an indication of a starting point within the digital document; receiving only the requested portion of the digital document including selected elements containing the indicated starting point; and generating a digital form of the received portion of the digital document by applying properties corresponding to the received selected elements to the text content of said elements.

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Claim 2:
2. The method of claim 1, wherein receiving only the requested portion includes receiving a starting point element, the starting point element having been selected according to the indicated starting point; and wherein the step of generating a digital form includes: providing a plurality of property specifications for type names utilized for elements in the digital document; receiving an identity of any ancestor elements of the starting point element; and applying a property specification corresponding to the type name of ancestor elements identified for each selected element to the text content of each selected element to produce the digital form.