A bookmaker's workbench

Abstract

We have been developing electronic Realistic Books that combine the natural advantages of electronic documents---full-text search, hyperlinks, animation, multimedia---with those of conventional books---the ambient information provided by the physical object, analog page turning, random-access navigation, bookmarks, highlighting and annotation. Although simple Realistic Books can easily be created from PDF or HTML files using a shell script or web service, it is not so easy for book designers to take advantage of advanced features that are not normally represented in the input files. This paper describes the Bookmaker's Workbench, an interactive system intended to help book designers produce Realistic Books. It incorporates many features, including a text mining option that automatically identifies significant key terms and marks them visually in the text, the ability to incorporate synonyms automatically into the full-text search capability, and include automatically generated back-of-the-book index. A user evaluation is reported that demonstrates the system's usability and learnability.