Tourmaline (abstract): macrostyles by example

Abstract

Tourmaline is a system that simplifies the formatting of complicated headings and captions in a WYSIWYG word precessor. The style systems of typical commercial word processors, although very useful, are too limited when a user needs to format items such as paper headings, which may contain many different styles within a single heading. The style systems of some batch oriented systems give the user more power by providing macro facilities to automatically format text, but these systems are extremely difficult to learn and use. Tourma.line uses demonstrational techniques [2] to combine the ease-of-use of WYSIWYG with the power of batch oriented text formatters. The system allows users to define mac-r-osfyles by example. A macrostyle is an abstract representation of a text object that allows different parts of the object to have completely different formatting attributes. In Tourmaline, the user provides an example of a correctly formatted heading using the word processor’s WYSIWYG interface. The system then examines the prototype heading and identifies the various text objects that make up the heading. Using attributes of those objects, such as their typographical characteristics and their position within the heading, combined with heuristics about how headings are generally structured, Tourmaline attempts to categorize each of the objects into a logical class (such as title or author name).