Capturing the layout of electronic documents for reuse in variable data printing

Personalized mailing in direct marketing campaign often requires sending out a unique piece of mail to each recipient while keeping the same look and feel across all the mail pieces in one campaign. In this paper, we describe a method that captures the layout of an existing page by identifying different logical blocks, extracting the style features of each logical block on the page, analyzing and extracting the layout relationships and constraints among different logical blocks. The captured layout can then be reused in automated composition of new documents.