1. A method comprising: at a publication server, receiving a human-readable publication document in an external format, the document comprising a plurality of visually perceptible document parts; determining the external format of the received document and selecting a format converter associated therewith from among multiple format converters associated with multiple respective external formats; using the selected format converter, converting the document, based on the visually perceptible document parts as reflected in visual clues of the document in the external format, from the external format into an intermediate mark-up-language format; parsing the document in the intermediate mark-up-language format to dissect the document, based on a plurality of document-element types associated with the internal format, into a plurality of document elements collectively constituting the contents of the document; representing the document in the internal format, in multiple views of the document that differ in at least one of a selection of document elements or an ordering of document elements, by storing, in one or more databases, (i) document-element entries for all of the document elements, each document-element entry comprising a unique document-element identifier and one or more document-element attributes characterizing a content of the respective document element, and, (ii) multiple document-view data structures for respective ones of the multiple views of the document, each document-view data structure comprising an ordered list of document-element identifiers of at least a non-null subset of the document elements.