Aesthetic measure of alignment and regularity

ABSTRACT

To be effective as communications or sales tools, documents that are personalized and customized for each customer must be visually appealing and aesthetically pleasing. Producing perhaps millions of unique versions of essentially the same document not only presents challenges to the printing process but also disrupts the standard quality control procedures. The quality of the alignment in each document can easily distinguish professionally looking documents from amateur designs and some computer generated layouts. A multicomponent measure of document alignment and regularity, derived directly from designer knowledge, is developed and presented in computable form. The measure includes: edge quality, page connectivity, grid regularity and alignment statistics. It is clear that these components may have different levels of importance, relevance and acceptability for various document types and classes, thus the proposed measure should always be evaluated against the requirements of the desired class of documents.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.7 DOCUMENT AND TEXT PROCESSING
      I.7.5 Document Capture
          Subjects: Document analysis

General Terms:
Algorithms

Keywords:
aesthetic rules, alignment, automatic layout evaluation, designer grid, regularity, the hough transform