Active document versioning: from layout understanding to adjustment

This paper introduces a novel Active Document Versioning system that can extract the layout template and constraints from the original document and then automatically adjust the layout to accommodate new contents. “Active” reflects several unique features of the system: First, the need of handcrafting adjustable templates is largely eliminated through layout understanding techniques that can convert static documents into Active Layout Templates and accompanying constraints. Second, through the linear text block modeling and the two-pass constraint solving algorithm, it supports a rich set of layout operations, such as simultaneous optimization of text block width and height, integrated image cropping, and non-rectangular text wrapping. This system has been successfully applied to a wide range of professionally designed documents. This paper covers both the core algorithms and the implementation.