Structure of ALTO Files

An ALTO file consists of three major sections as children of the root <alto> element:

<Description>
<Styles>
<Layout>

The <Description> section contains metadata about the ALTO file itself and processing information on how the file was created.

The <Styles> section contains the text and paragraph styles with their individual descriptions:

<TextStyle> has font descriptions
<ParagraphStyle> has paragraph descriptions, e.g. alignment information

The <Layout> section contains the content information. It is subdivided into <Page> elements.

A page consists of margins and printspace, all of those are non-intersection rectangular areas within the page area. Each of these can contain any number of objects like lines, images or textblocks and more. A textblock is divided into textlines and those are divided furthermore in strings and spaces.

The global structure of the ALTO file is as follows:

<alto>

<Description>

<MeasurementUnit/>

<sourceImageInformation/>

<Processing/>

</Description>

<Styles>

<TextStyle/>

<ParagraphStyle/>

</Styles>

<Layout>

<Page>

<TopMargin/>

<LeftMargin/>

<RightMargin/>

<BottomMargin/>

<PrintSpace/>

</Page>

</Layout>

</alto>

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