FlexDoc: Flexible Document Adaptation through Optimizing both Content and Layout

TL;DR

FlexDoc is a framework that automatically adapts document content and layout to various devices and user preferences, reducing manual redesign efforts through a comprehensive optimization process.

Contribution

It introduces a novel optimization-based approach for dynamic document adaptation, integrating content summarization and image carving techniques.

Findings

Successfully applied in news readers and academic papers.

Reduces manual effort in creating multiple layouts.

Enhances user experience across diverse devices.

Abstract

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 for manually creating 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. Furthermore, we demonstrate FlexDoc in multiple real-world application scenarios, such as news readers and academic papers.