Glossary
The vocabulary, without the marketing
Document viewing has a small vocabulary that everybody uses slightly differently, which is how procurement conversations end with two sides agreeing on a word and disagreeing on the thing. These are the definitions we mean when we use them — including the places where the honest answer is less flattering than the brochure.
All terms
- Air-gapped deployment
- Running software in an environment with no network route to the internet, so every dependency it needs must already be inside the boundary.
- Definition
- DICOM and multi-frame studies
- DICOM is the standard container for medical imaging. A multi-frame study holds a sequence of images in a single file, which is why viewing one needs playback controls rather than page-by-page display.
- Definition
- Document conversion
- Transforming a file from one format into another and producing a new file, as distinct from rendering, which produces a temporary visual representation and no new artifact.
- Definition
- Document viewer SDK
- A library you embed in your own application so it can display documents, as distinct from a hosted service you upload documents to. The SDK runs inside your process; the service runs inside somebody else's.
- Definition
- OCR (optical character recognition)
- Reconstructing machine-readable text from an image of a page — the operation that gives a scanned document the text layer it was never born with.
- Definition
- Office interop (server-side automation)
- Driving Microsoft Office from code to open or convert documents. It works on a desktop and is explicitly discouraged on a server, by Microsoft as well as by everyone who has tried it.
- Definition
- Opaque session token
- An identifier that carries no meaning to whoever holds it — it references server-side state rather than describing it, so a client cannot read it, modify it, or guess a neighbouring value.
- Definition
- Server-side document rendering
- Converting a document into page images on the server, so the browser displays rendered pages rather than parsing the original file itself.
- Definition
- Text layer
- The machine-readable text stored inside a document alongside its visual appearance. It is what makes search and text selection possible, and it is exactly what a scanned page does not have.
- Definition
- Web farm deployment
- Running one application across several servers behind a load balancer, so consecutive requests from the same user may be handled by different machines.
- Definition
Still an unfamiliar term?
The documentation covers the architecture in depth, and llms.txt carries a condensed factual summary if you are pointing an AI assistant at Doconut.