AN APPARATUS FOR A DIGITAL TEXT READER FOR A MANAGEABLE CO-PRESENTATION OF THE WRITER'S ORIGINAL RENDITION OF A TEXT AND THE READER'S RE-RENDERING OF IT

摘要

A text display system provides a co-presentation of the writer's originalrendition of a long-formtext and a reader's re-rendering of it via a visual representation of theentire text along withmethods of manipulation of the visual representation. The strategy assumesthat a typical long-form text, e.g., book length, contains a plurality of pages that is impossibleto displaycompletely on screen where the content is visible and readable to a human userwithoutassistance, the text is given an alternative representation (not scaled) toprovide a global accessto any part of the text. While a user can access any part of the text in mostdigital text readersby way of table of contents or a page number, the present invention allows asimultaneouslocal and global view through a user-initiated selection of two or moreconcepts to behighlighted throughout the text. A random selection of concepts by the usermimics a reader'sskimming of a text that may be localized in selected regions of the text;reading via skimming isassumed to not truly obey the writer's presentation order of the text. At thesame time, theglobal representation of the entire text is maintained with the user-initiatedselectionshighlighted so that the writer's original presentation remains accessible. Theco-presentation ofthe local view and the global view allows for the reader's view that maydiffer significantly fromthe writer's and yet does not dismantle the original text.