Facsimile and static presentation processing – Facsimile – Document filing and retrieval system
Reexamination Certificate
1996-08-20
2001-08-28
Grant, II, Jerome (Department: 2624)
Facsimile and static presentation processing
Facsimile
Document filing and retrieval system
C358S444000, C345S205000, C345S522000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06281986
ABSTRACT:
TECHNICAL FIELD
The present invention relates to the display of documents stored in electronic form. More specifically, it relates to methods for enhancing the browsing of such documents.
BACKGROUND ART
Paper, for reasons of long familiarity and universal dissemination, is the information storage and transfer medium people are most comfortable and adept with. The most commonly used paper information storage form remains the book and similar objects, and advantages can be obtained by creating the illusion of such objects for those using a computer. In this model, computer objects present their information content as a sequence of regular pages, each potentially displaying a variety of media types.
Browsing information in an electronic medium consists of the repetitive selection and display of portions of that information. These portions of the information are referenced herein as “pages” and the information itself is referenced to as the “document”. The “document type” defines how the document is displayed; e.g. an electronic book would have its pages displayed from left to right and a rollerdex from bottom to top.
Reading a document at low speed is easily supported by most hardware architectures. Pages stored in a slow mass storage off-line memory are prefetched into a fast access cache memory before being loaded into the display memory. Prefetching into a cache overcomes delays caused by the slow access time of the off-line mass storage device. As the browsing rate increases, however, the bandwidth of the data paths between the off-line memory, cache and display memories and the memory access times become limiting factors in how quickly new pages of the document can be displayed. Data rates high enough to fulfil the requirement that the user remain unaware of the computer interface can often not be achieved. This leads to uneven and often long delays between the selection of desired material and its display, the delay depending on the page's content. Even when there is a high bandwidth available, complex page structures in the data to be displayed can cause problems for efficient browsing and navigation.
A paper, “An Electronic Book: APTBook”, Human-Computer Interaction Conference INTERAC '90, pages 513-519 by Miyazawa et al describes one possible solution to this problem. A technique called “hierarchic compression” is employed for fast browsing. A compressed version of the page content is displayed, showing little detail. As the browsing speed decreases, progressively more details of the page are shown. This method is implemented by storing the book's contents in a fixed hierarchical tree structure. The data is accessed horizontally across the tree, the browsing speed defining the level at which data is accessed. Because the importance of a particular feature of a document is defined by its position in the tree structure, this solution is inflexible and can not easily be adapted to other electronic document structures. This solution also makes assumptions about the logical organization of the electronic document. In some applications the displayed compressed data makes no useful contribution to the display as it is unreadable. In such cases it would be preferable if the compressed data was not displayed at all as it serves only to “clutter” the display. The ability to limit the information displayed is not discussed in the APTBook paper and no mention of how the data structure is related to the memory hierarchy of the browsing system is made.
Other relevant articles include, “Software For Reading Text On Screen”, D. J. Pullinger, Human-Computer Interaction, IFIP, 1987 and “Formative Design-Evaluation of SuperBook”, D. E. Egan, et al., Bellcore, ACM Transactions on Information Systems, Vol. 7, No. 1. Both articles state the problem well but provide no satisfactory solution to presenting electronically stored data in a book form, which can be as easily and rapidly manipulated by the user as a book.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
According to the present invention we provide a method for viewing electronically stored documents at different speeds, the speed being adjustable by the user, the method comprising the steps of:
storing the electronic documents in long term memory as a plurality of pages, a page being further stored as a plurality of frames, each frame comprising a data type;
characterised by rating the stored frames, the rating depending on at least the frame's data type and/or location; and
moving frames from the long term memory into a cache memory depending upon the user selected viewing speed and the rating of the frame.
In this way, frames are rated to determine whether they are stored in the cache memory or the long term memory for a given viewing speed so that the frames which it is more important to display at high viewing speeds get allocated storage space in the cache memory.
In the embodiment to be described, at a first user selected viewing speed, all of the stored frames are moved into the cache memory regardless of their rating. This means that the viewing speed is slow enough for the content of all of the frames to be fully displayed. At a second user selected viewing speed, only frames having a rating above a first predetermined rating are moved into the cache memory. Other frames have their content represented in the cache memory in less detail eg as a fallback rendition and such frames are not fully displayed during viewing. At a third user selected viewing speed, only frames having a rating above a second predetermined rating greater than the first predetermined rating are moved into the cache memory.
Preferably, three attributes are recorded for a frame and influence its rating, one attribute indicating the appearance of the frame, one attribute indicating the logical function of the frame in the page and the other attribute indicating the position of the frame on the page.
Preferably, one or more of the stored pages are also rated. The use of page ratings in addition to frame ratings provides greater flexibility in the system and can facilitate the initialising of a system for document viewing. More weight may be given to page ratings than frame ratings in determining which frames are moved into the cache memory. The page rating may determine whether a page is pre-loaded into the cache memory prior to document viewing by a user.
In the embodiment to be described, the electronically stored document is made visually to resemble a book on a display screen, and selecting the first, second and third viewing speeds incrementally increases the speed at which pages of the book appear. In this embodiment, fewer frames of each successive page are moved from the long term memory to the cache memory as the user selects increasingly higher viewing speeds, with at least one frame from each successive page which indicates the position of the frame within the book being moved from the long term memory to the cache memory.
According to another aspect of the present invention we provide a system for permitting a user to view electronically stored documents at different speeds, the system comprising:
a long term memory for storing the documents as a series of pages, each page in turn being formed from a plurality of frames,
a cache memory for temporarily storing frames recalled from the long term memory;
a processor coupled to the cache memory and the long term memory so that, on the processor receiving from a user both a request for a stored document and a requested viewing speed, the processor recalls selected frames from the long term memory into the cache memory;
a display coupled to the processor for displaying pages and frames;
characterised in that each frame is rated relative to its viewing priority and in that the rating of a frame and the requested viewing speed determine whether the processor recalls the frame to the cache memory.
Preferably, the processor recalls increasingly fewer frames from the long term memory to the cache memory as the requested viewing speed increases.
The embodiment of the present invention to be described comprise
Grant II Jerome
Hewlett--Packard Company
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