Automatically highlighting text in an electronic document

摘要

An apparatus and method helps a user to determine parts of an electronic document that are of interest by allowing the user to define preferences for processing an electronic document, and by automatically highlighting one or more portions of the document according to the user preferences. Highlighting includes any way to enhance or alter the appearance of text, including bold, italics, underlining, change in font style, change in font size, change in color, change in background color, etc. The automatic highlighting of portions of the document attract the user's eyes to that portion of the document, which helps the user to discern whether or not the highlighted portion is relevant or interesting. The preferred embodiments also include a document generator that takes an input document and generates therefrom an output document that has one or more highlighted portions that are hard-coded into the document according to the user preferences.

主权项

1. An apparatus comprising:
at least one processor; a memory coupled to the at least one processor; an electronic document residing in the memory; an automatic document processing mechanism residing in the memory and executed by the at least one processor, the automatic document processing mechanism processing the electronic document and automatically producing selective highlighting for at least a portion of the electronic document to enhance the comprehension of the electronic document by a human reader, the automatic document processing mechanism determining which portions of the electronic document to selectively highlight based on user preferences that include a specification of at least one word in the electronic document that triggers highlighting of a corresponding portion of the electronic document, the automatic document processing mechanism including:
a display mechanism that displays the selective highlighting in a display of the electronic document without altering the electronic document; anda conversion mechanism that generates a new electronic document that includes all information in the electronic document and additionally includes at least one markup language tag that specifies to the automatic document processing mechanism how to perform at least a portion of the selective highlighting of the new electronic document.