GeM (Genre and Multimodality) investigated the relationship between multimodal document genres and their realization in text, layout and diagrams. As part of this work a prototype page generation system was developed based on XML, XSLT and the GeM project multimodal annotation scheme. The prototype concentrates specifically on the controlled generation of the layout (including placing of text and graphics, titles, and font selections) adopted on the page, making this sensitive to generic constraints holding for the multimodal document type; the generation of the language elements included is not in focus. The generic constraints are derived from the corpus analysis done within the GeM project and are represented following the GeM annotation scheme.

Two examples of generated pages from the prototype are the following, the first from the genre of bird field guides and the second from the genre of instruction manuals.