Andrew Arthur Hunter

Web-based magazine design for self publishers

Short run printing technology and web services such as MagCloud provide new opportunities for long-tail magazine publishing. They enable self publishers to supply magazines to a wide range of communities, including groups that are too small to be viable as target communities for conventional publishers. In a Web 2.0 world where users constantly discover new services and where they may be infrequent patrons of any single service, it is unreasonable to expect users to learn the complex service behaviors. Furthermore, we want to open up publishing opportunities to novices who are unlikely to have prior experience of publishing and who lack design expertise. Magazine design automation is an ambitious goal, but recent progress with another web service, Autophotobook, proves that some level of automation of publication design is feasible. This paper describes our current research effort to extend the automation capabilities of Autophotobook to address the issues of magazine design so that we can provide a service to support professional-quality self publishing by novice users for a wide range of community types and sizes.

Non-Manhattan layout extraction algorithm

Automated publishing requires large databases containing document page layout templates. The number of layout templates that need to be created and stored grows exponentially with the complexity of the document layouts. A better approach for automated publishing is to reuse layout templates of existing documents for the generation of new documents. In this paper, we present an algorithm for template extraction from a docu- ment page image. We use the cost-optimized segmentation algorithm (COS) to segment the image, and Voronoi decomposition to cluster the text regions. Then, we create a block image where each block represents a homo- geneous region of the document page. We construct a geometrical tree that describes the hierarchical structure of the document page. We also implement a font recognition algorithm to analyze the font of each text region. We present a detailed description of the algorithm and our preliminary results.

Layout hierarchies for interactive design reuse

The advent of viable long tail & self-publishing solutions ([1], [2]) has spawned new requirements for automatic layout technologies. In most cases these attempt to lay out whole pages, spreads or documents based on complete content data. In this paper we introduce a new approach to document layout based on the principle of interactive design reuse, in which a new design is created from an existing high quality design via a sequence of simple steps to establish the final content. Based on our experience building such a system we propose a method of building layout hierarchies and discuss the implementation of editing operations appropriate to this new paradigm.

Automatic page composition with nested sub-layouts

This paper provides an overview of a system for the automatic composition of publications. The system first composes nested hierarchies of contents, then applies layout engines at branch points in the hierarchies to explore layout options, and finally selects the best overall options for the finished publications. Although the system has been developed as a general platform for automated publishing, this paper describes its application to the composition and layout of a magazine-like publication for social content from Facebook. The composition process works by assembling design fragments that have been populated with text and images from the Facebook social network. The fragments constitute a design language for a publication. Each design fragment is a nested mutable sub-layout that has no specific size or shape until after it has been laid-out. The layout process balances the space requirements of the fragment’s internal contents with its external context in the publication. The mutability of sub-layouts requires that their layout options must be kept open until all the other contents that share the same space have been considered. Coping with large numbers of options is one of the greatest challenges in layout automation. Most existing layout methods work by rapidly elimination design options rather than by keeping options open. A further goal of this publishing system is to confirm that a custom publication can be generated quickly by the described methods. In general, the faster that publications can be created, the greater the opportunities for the technology.

Automatic Page Composition with Combined Image Crop and Layout Metrics

Automatic layout algorithms simplify the composition of image-rich documents, but they still require users to have sufficient artistry to supply well cropped and composed imagery. Combining an automatic cropping technology with a document layout system enables better results to be produced faster by less-skilled users. This paper reviews prior work in automatic image cropping and automatic page layout and presents a case for a combined crop and layout technology. We describe one such technology in a system for interactive publication design by amateur self-publishers and show that providing an automatic cropping system with additional information about the layout context can enable it to generate a more appropriate set of ranked crop options for a given image. Furthermore, we show that providing an automatic layout system with sets of ranked crop options for images can enable it to compose more appropriate page layouts.

Book Widget: embedding automated photo-document publication on the Web and in mobile devices

We describe a cloud-based automated-publishing platform that allows third party developers to embed our software components into their applications, enabling their users to rapidly create documents for interactive viewing, or fulfillment via mail or retail printing. We also describe how applications built on this platform can integrate with a variety of different consumer digital ecosystems, and how we will address the quality and scaling challenges.