Context-oriented Layout Optimization of Large-Print Textbooks

Large-print textbooks are used by low vision students in school. Because these books are mainly prepared by volunteers and almost all steps in the preparation process are performed manually, they cannot be mass-produced. The chronic shortage of these books has been a social problem in Japan. The procedure for preparing a large-print textbook involves (1) converting the size of figures and characters in the original textbook to one suitable for low vision students and (2) positioning them appropriately on the pages. In this paper, we propose a novel method for automatically optimizing a layout by employing a context structure. We represent the context structure by using a graph called a context structure graph. The proposed method first allocates each material to an appropriate page, and then optimizes the layout of each page by using the sequence-pair method. Throughout these operations, we employ an objective function derived from the context structure graph to ensure that the context in the original textbook is preserved in the large-print textbook prepared.