Global Beautification of Layouts
with Interactive Ambiguity Resolution

UIST 2014

Pengfei Xu¹   Hongbo Fu²   Takeo Igarashi³   Chiew-Lan Tai<sup>1 

1</sup>HKUST    ²City University of Hong Kong    ³The University of Tokyo

Our novel interface for global beautification of layouts of graphic elements with the power of interactive ambiguity resolution. Grids are visualized for reference purpose only but not for editing.

Automatic global beautification methods have been proposed for sketch-based interfaces, but they can lead to undesired results due to ambiguity in the user’s input. To facilitate ambiguity resolution in layout beautification, we present a novel user interface for visualizing and editing inferred relationships. First, our interface provides a preview of the beautified layout with inferred constraints, without directly modifying the input layout. In this way, the user can easily keep refining beautification results by interactively repositioning and/or resizing elements in the input layout. Second, we present a gestural interface for editing automatically inferred constraints by directly interacting with the visualized constraints via simple gestures. Our efficient implementation of the beautification system provides the user instant feedback. Our user studies validate that our tool is capable of creating, editing and refining layouts of graphic elements and is significantly faster than the standard snap-dragging and command-based alignment tools.

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@INPROCEEDINGS{GlobalLayoutBeautification:2014,
author = {Pengfei Xu and Hongbo Fu and Takeo Igarashi and Chiew-Lan Tai},
title = {Global Beautification of Layouts with Interactive Ambiguity Resolution},
booktitle = {UIST '14},
year = {2014},
}