Aesthetic measures for automated document layout

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2021

Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie, 1998

EVERY TEACHER AND PRACTITIONER OF TECHNICAL WRITING will benefit from reading this authoritative book about document design: "the field concerned with creating texts ... that integrate words and pictures in ways that help people to achieve their specific goals for using texts at home, school, or work" (p. 10). What struck me most about this remarkable book are its very wide scope, its remarkably broad research base, its very rich analyses of documents that exemplify various aspects of document design, and its integrity of vision. Most parts of the book converge on Schriver's thesis of the primacy of the reader in all document design decisions and on her conviction, based on experimental evidence, that feedback from the reader will improve document design. The breadth of subject matter is at first almost forbidding. This book provides a critical history of document design, a timeline placing key events in document design in various other contexts, a critical review of several approaches to audience analysis, an analysis of how readers respond to poorly designed documents and products, a comprehensive discussion of typography and space, a critical analysis of the interplay of words and illustrations, and a demonstration, finally, that good writing and good graphic design do matter to readers. The book's treatment of this wide range of subjects is always comprehensive, sometimes perhaps to a fault. The 800-item bibliography is one indication of the breadth and depth of the research base, but it does not by itself show that Schriver always approaches the literature critically and integrates it into a "state of the art" overview. If she disagrees with researchers, she does not hesitate to be blunt:

Advances in Pattern Recognition, 2007

EP92—Proceedings of Electronic Publishing, 1992

This paper compares high-quality craft typography with the state of the art in automated typesetting. The first part discusses several typographical conventions which cannot be implemented by means of any formatting model currently in use. The second part explains why the current paradigms of computerized typesetting will not serve for high-quality formatting and suggests directions for the further research necessary to improve the quality of computer generated layout.

Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Intelligent user interface - IUI '04, 2004

Layout refers to the process of determining the size and position of the visual objects in an information presentation. We introduce the WeightMap, a bitmap representation of the visual weight of a presentation. In addition, we present algorithms that use WeightMaps to allow an automated layout system to evaluate the effectiveness of its layouts. Our approach is based on the concepts of visual weight and visual balance, which are fundamental to the visual arts. The objects in the layout are each assigned a visual weight, and a WeightMap is created that encodes the visual weight of the layout. Image-processing techniques, including pyramids and edge detection, are then used to efficiently analyze the WeightMap for balance. In addition, derivatives of the sums of the rows and columns are used to generate suggestions for how to improve the layout.

Technical Communication Quarterly, 2005

Page 1. Explicit Structure in Print and On-Screen Documents David K. Farkas University of Washington The structure of print and on-screen documents is made explicit through headings and links. Three important concepts for ...

2005

Co-referential relations between textual and visual elements in illustrations can be encoded efficiently through textual labels. The labels support students to learn unknown terms and focus their attention on important aspects of the illustration; while a functional and aesthetic label layout aims at guaranteeing the readability of text strokes as well as preventing the referential mismatches. By analyzing a corpus of complex label layouts in hand-drawn illustrations, a classification of label layout styles and several metrics for functional requirements and aesthetic attributes were extracted. As the choice of a specific layout style seems largely determined by individual preferences, a real-time layout algorithm for internal and external labels balances conflicting user-specific requirements, functional and aesthetic attributes.

2015

a short summary of a paper put in the beginning, below the author lines and above the body text. Achromatic colours are black and white. Active space or positive space in a visual is the part representing different objects. Space has no meaning in itself, but it may be used to separate or bring together different picture elements. Agate lines are vertical measurement of space, there are fourteen agate lines to an inch. Artistic layout may please the individual artistic graphic designer, but may have no relation to the content of the message. Ascender. The part of a lower case letter (b, d, f, h, k, l) that ascend above its x-height. These letters may be taller than the cap height. Author lines are the lines at the beginning of a paper with the name of the author or the authors. It is often centred and set in smaller type than the heading.

Proceedings of the 9th ACM symposium on Document engineering - DocEng '09, 2009

We review the literature on automatic document formatting with an emphasis on recent work in the field. One common way to frame document formatting is as a constrained optimization problem where decision variables encode element placement, constraints enforce required geometric relationships, and the objective function measures layout quality. We present existing research using this framework, describing the kind of optimization problem being solved and the basic optimization techniques used to solve it. Our review focuses on the formatting of primarily textual documents, including both micro-and macro-typographic concerns. We also cover techniques for automatic table layout. Related problems such as widget and diagram layout, as well as temporal layout issues that arise in multimedia documents are outside the scope of this review.

COMSt Bulletin, 2023

Studying written artefacts from a cross-cultural comparative perspective poses many challenges, one of which is a set of technical terms that were developed for the patterns in written artefacts from one particular manuscript culture. If used to describe those from others without sufficient reflection, the results can be misunderstandings at best and asymmetries that pose the patterns of one culture as ‘standard’ and any differences in others as divergences from this standard. This paper takes as its point of departure the humble script column, which has been a ubiquitous pattern of visual organisation of written artefacts in some, but by no means all manuscript cultures. It analyses the functions of this particular pattern of visual organisation and traces its origins to the Mediterranean cultures of the scroll before widening the perspective to consider alternative patterns of visual organisation developed by manuscript cultures that do not use columns to meet the particular challenges set by—and in turn informing—the formal, material, and writing patterns of their own written artefacts.