THESIS
2015
xiii, 77 pages : illustrations ; 30 cm
Abstract
Selection and arrangement of graphic elements are two fundamental tasks in many text and
graphic editing scenarios. Traditional interactive techniques such as lasso selection, snapping
and arrangement commands are provided by most graphic editors to aid the users in accomplishing
these tasks. However, these techniques often ignore the underlying patterns of the
elements, requiring the users to perform explicit and tedious operations to achieve the goal of
the manipulation. It is expected that the amount of user interaction can be reduced by exploiting
the patterns of the elements. Nevertheless, designing effective pattern-aware interaction tools is
challenging due to the ambiguities in the patterns presented by the elements and the operations
issued by the user.
This thesis f...[
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Selection and arrangement of graphic elements are two fundamental tasks in many text and
graphic editing scenarios. Traditional interactive techniques such as lasso selection, snapping
and arrangement commands are provided by most graphic editors to aid the users in accomplishing
these tasks. However, these techniques often ignore the underlying patterns of the
elements, requiring the users to perform explicit and tedious operations to achieve the goal of
the manipulation. It is expected that the amount of user interaction can be reduced by exploiting
the patterns of the elements. Nevertheless, designing effective pattern-aware interaction tools is
challenging due to the ambiguities in the patterns presented by the elements and the operations
issued by the user.
This thesis focuses on developing effective pattern-aware interactive techniques to aid the
users in the selection and arrangement of elements. In particular, we propose three interactive
techniques which adopt different strategies to resolve the ambiguities that may arise during
manipulation.
First, we introduce a selection tool called Lazy Selection. It is a scribble-based tool for quick
selection of one or more desired shape elements by roughly stroking through the elements. Our
algorithm automatically refines the selection and reveals the user’s intention. It first extracts
selection candidates from the scribble-covered elements by examining the underlying patterns
and then ranks them based on their location and shape with respect to the user-sketched scribble.
Such a design makes this tool tolerant to imprecise input systems and applicable to touch
systems without suffering from the fat finger problem.
Second, we present GACA, a group-aware command-based arrangement tool. Compared with the traditional command-based arrangement tools, it reduces the number of selection operations
and command invocations. The key idea is that an issued arrangement command is in fact
very informative, instructing the tool how to automatically decompose a 2D layout into multiple
1D groups, each one being compatible with the command. The tool uses a parameter-free,
command-driven grouping approach so that users can easily predict our grouping results. We
also designed a simple user interface to enable explicit control of grouping and arrangement.
Third, we present a framework for automatic global beautification of layouts. To facilitate
ambiguity resolution in layout beautification, we include a novel user interface for visualizing
and editing inferred relationships. Our interface provides a preview of the beautified layout
with inferred constraints, without directly modifying the input layout. In this way, the user can
easily keep refining beautification results by interactively repositioning and/or resizing elements
in the input layout. In addition, we present a gestural interface for editing automatically inferred
constraints by directly interacting with the visualized constraints via simple gestures.
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