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Review of automatic document formatting
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Document Engineering archive
Proceedings of the 9th ACM symposium on Document engineering table of contents
Munich, Germany
SESSION: Document presentation (I) -- formatting, printing and layout table of contents
Pages 99-108  
Year of Publication: 2009
ISBN:978-1-60558-575-8
Authors
Nathan Hurst  Adobe Systems Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA
Wilmot Li  Adobe Systems Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA
Kim Marriott  Monash University, Victoria, Australia
Sponsors
SIGDOC: ACM Special Interest Group for Design of Communications
SIGWEB: ACM Special Interest Group on Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Web
ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
Publisher
ACM  New York, NY, USA
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ABSTRACT

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.


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