Despite the increase in the importance of information interchange by electronic, and in many cases, marked-up, human-readable document, an explicit and declarative expression of document style and layout is yet to be refined.

The coded character set does not solve all the problems. It just defines the variety of symbols that can be used in electronic document. With the coded character set alone, we will only be able to get plain text. The font specification does not solve all the problems, either. It includes the metrics (e.g. width and height, virtual or physical) of each glyph contained in a font set, and provides the clue for the intra-line positioning of adjacent glyph images.

The extra-line features of text, such as document composition and page layout, needs to be defined elsewhere. These features fall under the style specification, which defines the positioning of glyph images and other elements in a page. Line adjustment and justification also belong to the extra-line features because how text is adjusted or justified are resolved relative to other factors in a page (such as page width).

However, these style-oriented features are considered to be diverse from language to language, or more precisely, from culture to culture. From a broader perspective, most print conventions seem to have much in common, but a certain degree of discrepancy is also expected. And to enable these features to be represented in electronic text, standardisation efforts based upon local requirements are necessary.

This survey intends to identify elements that are typical to each language and literary tradition, based on a close review of printed materials, such as journals, books and other forms of publication. Ultimately, with the identified features, it aims to draw requirements that can serve as input to the discussion on the standardisation of document composition at ISO/IEC.

This survey included a series of field researches, conducted in Laos, Thailand and Singapore. Through the survey, we identified a number of examples which seem to represent features in local and vernacular printing conventions. One of the typical examples is the indentation of itemised text within a paragraph. We found out that when itemised text comes within a paragraph, it ignores the indentation or 'trespasses' the boundary of containing paragraph.

These findings, put together, indicate that elements in document formatting are not necessarily universal and that further works are required to have a close review of vernacular uses of document formatting, thus drawing requirements for standardisation.