Apparatus and method for automatically highlighting text in an electronic document

a technology of automatic highlighting and electronic documents, applied in the field of computer systems, can solve the problems of limited human skills and training, prior art does not offer assistance for a reader to more quickly comprehend a large electronic document, and users will be forced to use manual methods, so as to enhance or alter the appearance of tex

US20070061717A1Inactive Publication Date: 2007-03-15CRAGUN BRIAN JOHN +1
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Patent Information

Authority / Receiving Office
US · United States
Current Assignee / Owner
Publication Date
2007-03-15
Estimated Expiration
Not applicable · inactive patent

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Abstract

An apparatus and method helps a user to determine parts of an electronic document that are of interest by allowing the user to define preferences for processing an electronic document, and by automatically highlighting one or more portions of the document according to the user preferences. Highlighting includes any way to enhance or alter the appearance of text, including bold, italics, underlining, change in font style, change in font size, change in color, change in background color, etc. The automatic highlighting of portions of the document attract the user's eyes to that portion of the document, which helps the user to discern whether or not the highlighted portion is relevant or interesting. The preferred embodiments also include a document generator that takes an input document and generates therefrom an output document that has one or more highlighted portions that are hard-coded into the document according to the user preferences.
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Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATION

[0001] This patent application is a continuation of a patent application of the same title, Ser. No. 10 / 282,567 filed on Oct. 29, 2002, which is incorporated herein by reference.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

[0002] 1. Technical Field

[0003] This invention generally relates to computer systems, and more specifically relates to apparatus and methods for reading electronic documents.

[0004] 2. Background Art

[0005] Since the dawn of the computer age, computers have evolved and become more and more powerful. In our present day, computers have become indispensable in many fields of human endeavor including engineering design, machine and process control, information storage and retrieval, and office computing. One common use for computers is to allow a user to read electronic documents.

[0006] Many people have developed their own reading techniques for reading large documents. For example, some people may train themselves to scan the first sentence of...

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Embodiment Construction

[0026] The preferred embodiments automatically highlight an electronic document in a way that aids a human reader in quickly comprehending what is in the document. The highlighting is performed according to user preferences, which may default to some preset set of values and parameters, but which also allow a user to customize the settings according to particular needs. Once a user has set preferences for automatic highlighting, these preferences cause selective highlighting of text in the document. Highlighting can include any suitable way to accentuate the appearance of text, including a change in font type, font size, font color, background color, bold, italics, underline, double underline, etc. The preferred embodiments also include a mechanism that allows for automatically turning the highlighting on and off according to actions the user takes when browsing a document.

[0027] Referring now to FIG. 1, a computer system 100 is one suitable implementation of an apparatus in accord...