Using electronic facsimiles of documents for automaticreconstruction of underlying hypertext structures

摘要

When looking for detailed pieces of information within thefacsimiles of documents, a user has only a highly limited set ofsupportive tools at his disposal. As a solution to this problem, the useof automatically generated hypertext structures is proposed. Thesestructures also include conventional mechanisms like table of contents,index, or full text search, but extend to the possibility of associativesearches. The automatic generation of hypertext structures is based ontwo sources of information: the output of a commercial OCR system and adocument type dependent specification file including the specificationsfor both structure elements and link types. Thus, additional informationhidden in layout and typography is taken into account in addition to theplain ASCII representation of the document. The browsing problems thatmay arise from a hypertext's nonlinearity do not appear, because theuser also has access to the document in its original linearfashion