Exactformat

Exactformat is a proposed data format and rendering approach designed to encode exact typographic and layout information for text documents. It aims to preserve precise whitespace, line breaks, font metrics, and page composition across rendering environments.

Core concepts include whitespace preservation, explicit line and page layout instructions, font metrics and fallback rules, and metadata for document identity. exactformat environments may support both plain-text and rich-text contexts and can use either a simple ASCII-based syntax or a compact binary representation.

History and development: The concept emerged in the mid-2010s from researchers in digital typography and document engineering. It has inspired several prototypes and reference implementations, but there is no formal, widely adopted standard. Some projects describe modules or extensions labeled exactformat to indicate strict formatting controls.

Usage and tools: exactformat has seen use in archival digitization, software testing for deterministic rendering, and formatting verification workflows. Typical workflows involve writing content in exactformat, rendering to PDF or image outputs, and performing automated pixel- or glyph-level comparisons. Tools such as the ExactFormat Toolkit and ExactRender libraries appear in some ecosystems.

Reception and status: Proponents argue that exactformat enables reproducible rendering and exact capture of authorial intent. Critics point to complexity, limited interoperability with existing formats, and duplication of features provided by PDFs, LaTeX, HTML/CSS, or XML-based formats. As of this article, exactformat remains a topic of research rather than a formal standard.