The benefit of the Visual-Meta approach is that the PDF viewer software can interact with the document in richer ways, while not loosing the robustness of being a normal PDF document. For example:
- The reader software ‘knows’ the citation information of this document so that a reader can cite with a simply copy and paste
- The view/presentation of the text since the reader software is aware of the document’s structure and since this metadata is visible at the same level as the content of the document, it will not be stripped out as document formats change and it will not interfere with viewers which are not Visual-Meta aware.
There are further Immediate User Benefits, different User Community Benefits and Visual VS. Embedded Benefits.
Visual-Meta Unleashes Hypertextuality and advanced interactions such as Augmented Copying (copies with full citation information), References and Glossaries, as well as included information for how to parse tables, images and special interactions for graphs. This enables dynamic re-creations of interactions with sophisticated visualisations, which no longer needs to be flattened when committed to PDF.