From Print to Online Newspapers on Small Displays: A Layout Generation Approach Aimed at Preserving Entry Points

Sebastián Gallardo Dïaz (1) , Dorian Mazauric (2) , Pierre Kornprobst (3)

1 UTFSM - Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria [Valparaiso]
2 ABS - Algorithms, Biology, Structure
3 BIOVISION - Biologically plausible Integrative mOdels of the Visual system : towards synergIstic Solutions for visually-Impaired people and artificial visiON

Simply transposing the print newspapers into digital media can not be satisfactory because they were not designed for small displays. One key feature lost is the notion of entry points that are essential for navigation. By focusing on headlines as entry points, we show how to produce alternative layouts for small displays that preserve entry points quality (readability and usability) while optimizing aesthetics and style. Our approach consists in a relayouting approach implemented via a genetic-inspired approach. We tested it on realistic newspaper pages. For the case discussed here, we obtained more than 2000 different layouts where the font was increased by a factor of two. We show that the quality of headlines is globally much better with the new layouts than with the original layout. Future work will tend to generalize this promising approach, accounting for the complexity of real newspapers, with user experience quality as the primary goal.

Mots clés: Newspapers; digital publishing; document transformation; content customization; layout generation; usability; accessibility; readability; aesthetics; navigation; algorithms

Domaines: Informatique [cs]

Sebastián Gallardo Dïaz, Dorian Mazauric, Pierre Kornprobst. From Print to Online Newspapers on Small Displays: A Layout Generation Approach Aimed at Preserving Entry Points. DocEng '22 - 22nd ACM Symposium on Document Engineering, Sep 2022, San Jose, United States. pp.4, ⟨10.1145/3558100.3563847⟩. ⟨hal-03765845⟩