METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR CREATING AND MAINTAINING GRAPHIC REPRESENTATIONS OF DOCUMENTS UNDER A UNIVERSAL FORMAT

摘要

A document management system (110) for use in a computer system (112) that affords convenient access to documents configured under incompatible formats. The invention allows the graphical depictions of documents configured under a universal format to be stored and maintained in a viewer server (114) that can be accessed by a user on the system (112). This is accomplished by using a viewer server (114) to extract a graphical image of a document while performing a print operation and storing the image in a separate viewer file (116). The system (112) can therefore maintain files of a document under its original format (117) and in a separate file (116) under a universal format.