Document Thumbnails with Variable Text Scaling

Abstract

Document reader applications usually offer an overview of the layout for each page as thumbnail views. Reading the text in these becomes impossible when the font size becomes very small. We improve the readability of these thumbnails using a distortion method, which retains a readable font size of interesting text while shrinking less interesting text further. In contrast to existing approaches, our method preserves the global layout of a page and is able to show context around important terms. We evaluate our technique and show application examples.