FlexDoc: Flexible Document Adaptation through Optimizing both Content and Layout

• Published in: Proceedings (IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing) pp. 217 - 222
• Main Authors: Jiang, Yue, Lutteroth, Christof, Jain, Rajiv, Tensmeyer, Christopher, Manjunatha, Varun, Stuerzlinger, Wolfgang, Morariu, Vlad I.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 02.09.2024
• Subjects: Adaptive Document; Document Optimization; Layout; Layout Adaptation; Optimization; Text summarization; UI Adaptation; Visualization
• DOI: 10.1109/VL/HCC60511.2024.00032

Designing adaptive documents that are visually appealing across various devices and for diverse viewers is a challenging task. This is due to the wide variety of devices and different viewer requirements and preferences. Alterations to a document's content, style, or layout often necessitate numerous adjustments, potentially leading to a complete layout redesign. We introduce FlexDoc, a framework for creating and consuming documents that seamlessly adapt to different devices, author, and viewer preferences and interactions. It eliminates the need to manually create multiple document layouts, as FlexDoc enables authors to define desired document properties using templates and employs both discrete and continuous optimization in a novel comprehensive optimization process, which leverages automatic text summarization and image carving techniques to adapt both layout and content during consumption dynamically. Further, we demonstrate FlexDoc in real-world scenarios.