A Home For Home Pages

Interleaf says Cyberleaf software eases data conversion from word processors to the World Wide Web's hypertext language

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By Clinton Wilder
Issue: 11/21/94

Interleaf inc. wants to ease the difficulties in presenting data on the Internet. On Nov. 14, Interleaf is to unveil Cyberleaf, software the company says will dramatically simplify the process of setting up data pages on the World Wide Web (WWW).

Information on the Internet to be accessed through a WWW home page interface must first be converted to an Internet format called HTML (HyperText Markup Language). Within HTML, developers create "hyperlinks" that allow users with browsers such as Mosaic to access prod uct catalogs or other data by double-clicking on highlighted text. But that conversion can be painstaking.

Spreading The Word
Interleaf claims Cyberleaf is the first product that will convert documents from standard word processing programs into the HTML format. These include Microsoft's Word, Novell's WordPerfect, Frame Technology's FrameMaker, standard Ascii, and the Interleaf 5 and Interleaf 6 desktop publishing systems. (At Comdex, however, Microsoft announced a free add-on for Word that automatically converts word-processing documents to HTML.)

"What now takes hours or days will be reduced to a matter of minutes," says Brian Zanghi, strategic accounts manager for Interleaf in Waltham, Mass.

One Cyberleaf tester is Enterprise Integration Technologies Corp. (EIT). The company handles home page setups and other technical chores for CommerceNet , a Menlo Park, Calif., Internet commerce consortium that includes Bank o f America, Hewlett-Packard, and Apple Computer. The consortium has a heterogeneous environment with PCs, Macs, and Silicon Graphics and Sun workstations, says Jay Weber, director of research and development at EIT, also in Menlo Park. "For large collections of documents, having Cyberleaf could determine whether we import them into HTML," he adds.

The product will ship next month for four Unix-based workstation platforms: Sun's Sparc, Digital Equipment's OSF/1, HP's 700, and IBM's RS/6000. Versions of Cyberleaf for Microsoft's Windows and Windows NT are scheduled to ship in the first quarter of 1995.

List price for Cyberleaf is $795 per copy for the Unix version and $495 for the PC version, with discounts of up to 40% for corporate buyers.

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