Generating Packed Rectilinear Display Text Layouts with Weighted Word Emphasis

Cheryl Lao, Craig S. Kaplan, Daniel Vogel, Jose Echevarria, Paul Asente

Keywords: Typography, Packing, Display Text, Emphasis

TL;DR: An algorithm for generating and ranking all variations of packed rectangular display text layouts for a given phrase based on emphasis preferences.

Abstract: A common text layout style is a "packed rectilinear layout", in which non-overlapping word bounding boxes are packed so that their union forms a rectangle with no holes other than word and line spacing. Designing variations of these layouts while preserving word emphasis is a difficult and time-consuming process. We present a display text layout algorithm in which designers specify parameters that control the visual emphasis of words in these layouts. The number of possible layouts for a phrase follows the sequence of Big Schröder numbers as our algorithm involves the recursive subdivision of a rectangular bounding box. We conducted semi-structured interviews with graphic design experts to better understand their design decisions in creative typesetting. They rated the best-fitting layouts generated by our system to be very similar to designs that they would have created themselves.

Track: Graphics

Revision: No

Summary Of Changes:

Thank you for your constructive reviews. Below is a description of revisions we made based on reviewer comments (in quotes) organised by the high level comments of the area chair [y6Df] (in ALLCAPS).

TECHNICAL DEPTH

[so6Q] suggested a framework diagram or pseudocode. We tried both, but settled on providing an Algorithm Summary (section 3.0.1) which conveys the same overall process information as a framework diagram. We also reworded parts of the Technique section for clarity.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

Reviewer [hHNQ]:
“Sec. 3.0.1: at this point it is unclear how Big Schroder numbers are relevant”
> We discussed constraints before Big Schröder numbers in the revision
”The actual algorithm is never described anywhere”
> We added an Algorithm Summary section
“Measuring Euclidean distance between something relative (emphasis vector) and something absolute (font size) makes no sense really because the scales are very different.”
> We added mention of normalization step before euclidean distance calculation to try to reduce this effect.
“(minor) Please do not start sentences with math (beginning of Sec 3.2)”
> We reworded that sentence.

Reviewer [nX73]:
“[W]hat are the running times?”
> This was mentioned in Section 3.4, but we improved the writing to make it clearer.
“What is the rational behind using (or not using) a binary tree?”
> We added an explanation why we did not make them binary trees in the second paragraph of section 3.1
“How would colors be combined with height to provide emphasis?”
> We discuss other emphasis techniques in section 6.1 in the discussion.
“The authors give a good example from Adobe in Section 1 [... ] but the paper does not show how their own technique would perform on the same example.”
> We added examples to Figure 3 (rows 5 and 6) to show how our technique works with the same quote as Figure 1.
“[W]hat is meant by "area". Is it width *height of the font? Or is it pixel coverage?”
> We defined word area in section 5.1 as width * height of a word
Reviewer [mS3A]:
“More thoroughly testing the system”
> We explained why we chose to limit the user study to layouts with 4 words and showed examples with longer phrases Figure 3
“Better integrating the interviews into the paper”
> We added a statement that the task is for evaluating the scoring system in section 4.2.1
“Justifying the design problem”
> We agree that other emphasis methods should be included in future work and revised the paper to talk about other visual emphasis methods in Section 6.1 in the Discussion
“Improving the technique for layout decisions”
> We edited Section 6.5 in the Discussion to mention the tree caching technique for optimization and other possible ways to filter and improve performance
Reviewer [so6Q]:
“Some important references are missing”
> We added some of the suggested related work (section 2, paragraphs 2 and 6). Note we did not include Afzal et al. and Wang et al. since they were about designs that incorporated text elements in curved configurations, which were outside of our focus in this paper. We also did not reference Reinart et al. because their work relates to packing irregular shapes into a given space.
“Some sections have only a short paragraph, which should be combined together. ”
> We made some structure changes that reduced the number of shorter paragraphs.
“Some typo errors …”
> These typos were fixed

EVALUATION INCOMPLETE

Reviewer [y6Df]:
“performance”
> The performance is reported in Section 3.4
“behaviour on longer examples including motivating example”
> Figure 3 now includes two extra example with longer phrases that match the motivating example to show how the algorithm prioritizes different layouts (rows 5 and 6)

OTHER CHANGES
> We edited the video figure to replace examples from external sources with examples from our tool.
> Other rephrasing and small copywriting changes