Patent Application
20050154760
1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to electronic documents, and, more particularly, to capturing portions of an electronic document.
2. Description of the Related Art
The audience for electronically published documents, such as on-line articles and e-books, has increased dramatically in the past few years and is expected to continue to rise. For example, e-books are becoming more popular every day because of their portability and easy access. Electronic documents may be particularly useful for people who need to keep up-to-date in rapidly evolving fields such as information technology. However, there are a number of drawbacks to using electronic documents. For example, an e-book can be several hundred pages long, and a reader may need to search through a large portion of the e-book to relocate an idea or a piece of information that was found in the e-book during a previous reading.
Traditional note-taking, i.e., with a sheet of paper and a pen or pencil, may be used to summarize important ideas and/or gather useful information. However, traditional note-taking may be considered tedious by some people. Taking electronic notes, or saving handwritten notes in electronic form, can also be inefficient, as it may require additional time and effort for data entry and editing. Alternatively, a markup tool may be used to mark up the text of the e-book if the reader has write privileges for the e-book. However, a reader may still spend a large amount of time searching through the e-book to locate the marked up text. The time spent relocating information may be even longer for researchers who were not the original readers of the text. Because these researchers did not insert the mark ups, they may not know where in the e-book the mark ups may be found.
An electronic copy of portions of the electronic document may also be created using the familiar copy-and-paste tools available in virtually all electronic document viewing, creation, and publication software. However, creating a summary document from an e-book using traditional copy-and-paste operations may be a tedious and time-consuming process. For example, in order to transfer a single sentence from a first document to a second document, a reader must first open the first document, select the text of the sentence, “copy” the selected text into a clipboard or buffer using a copy command, open the second document, and finally “paste” the selected text from the clipboard or buffer into the second document using a paste command.
The aforementioned drawbacks to traditional methods of capturing information from electronic documents may be exacerbated when a single reader is trying to capture information from more than one document, when more than one reader is trying to capture information from a single document, or when a team of researchers is trying to summarize a plurality of documents in one or more documents available to the team members. Thus, the efficiency of a reader that is researching a topic using many online articles and/or e-books, or a team that is using the same online articles and/or e-books to research a particular topic, may be reduced. Consequently, traditional methods of capturing information may undermine the original motivation for creating the electronic document, i.e. ease and speed of access to the information in the electronic document.
The present invention is directed to addressing, or at least reducing, the effects of, one or more of the problems set forth above.
In one aspect of the instant invention, a method is provided for capturing portions of an electronic document. The method includes activating a capture mode based on a user input, selecting a portion of an electronic document in response to activating the capture mode, and receiving the selected portion of the electronic document in response to selecting the portion of the electronic document. The method also includes providing the selected portion of the electronic document in a predetermined format.
In another aspect of the present invention, an apparatus is provided for capturing portions of an electronic document. The apparatus includes an interface and a control unit communicatively coupled to the interface. The control unit is adapted to activate a capture mode based upon a user input, select a portion of an electronic document in response to activating the capture mode, and receive the selected portion of the electronic document in response to selecting the portion of the electronic document. The control unit is also adapted to provide the selected portion of the electronic document in a predetermined format.
In yet another aspect of the present invention, a method is provided for activating a capture mode and receiving at least one portion of the at least one electronic document in response to the user selecting the at least one portion of the electronic document based on the activated capture mode. The method also includes providing the selected portion of the electronic document in a predetermined format and de-activating the capture mode.
The invention may be understood by reference to the following description taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings, in which like reference numerals identify like elements, and in which:
While the invention is susceptible to various modifications and alternative forms, specific embodiments thereof have been shown by way of example in the drawings and are herein described in detail. It should be understood, however, that the description herein of specific embodiments is not intended to limit the invention to the particular forms disclosed, but on the contrary, the intention is to cover all modifications, equivalents, and alternatives falling within the spirit and scope of the invention as defined by the appended claims.
Illustrative embodiments of the invention are described below. In the interest of clarity, not all features of an actual implementation are described in this specification. It will of course be appreciated that in the development of any such actual embodiment, numerous implementation-specific decisions must be made to achieve the developers' specific goals, such as compliance with system-related and business-related constraints, which will vary from one implementation to another. Moreover, it will be appreciated that such a development effort might be complex and time-consuming, but would nevertheless be a routine undertaking for those of ordinary skill in the art having the benefit of this disclosure.
The words and phrases used herein should be understood and interpreted to have a meaning consistent with the understanding of those words and phrases by those skilled in the relevant art. No special definition of a term or phrase, i.e., a definition that is different from the ordinary and customary meaning as understood by those skilled in the art, is intended to be implied by consistent usage of the term or phrase herein. To the extent that a term or phrase is intended to have a special meaning, i.e., a meaning other than that understood by skilled artisans, such a special definition will be expressly set forth in the specification in a definitional manner that directly and unequivocally provides the special definition for the term or phrase.
The monitor 105 is capable of displaying one or more electronic documents 125 such as electronic articles, online articles, and/or e-books that may be accessed by a user of the processor-based device 100. The electronic documents 125 may include digital information that may be represented on the monitor 105 as text, graphics, video, hyperlinks, and the like. Persons of ordinary skill in the art should appreciate that the digital information included in the electronic documents 125 may be provided in a wide variety of forms. For example, in alternative embodiments, the digital information included in the electronic documents 125 may include other forms of digital information such as embedded files, code fragments, sound clips, animations, and the like. Moreover, the digital information included in the electronic documents 125 may be presented in a variety of formats or types including, but not limited to, XML format, HTML format, PDF format, one or more word processing program formats, rich text format, and the like. For example, the monitor 105 may concurrently display texts from Macromedia®, Lotus® Suite, Microsoft® suite and the web.
Generally, and as described in greater detail below, the capture module 120 allows a user to conveniently and efficiently gather electronic information from one or more of the documents 125. In one embodiment, the user may activate the capture module 120 by providing an input indicating that the user wishes to capture electronic information from one or more of the documents 125. The activated capture module 120 may then capture information that is selected by the user. Additional features may also be provided for organizing the captured information in a variety of desired formats. The capture module 120 illustrated in
As discussed above, the processor-based devices 205 may be desktop computers, laptop computers, personal digital assistants, mainframe computers, and the like, as well as any combination of these devices. The server 210, in one embodiment, may be one form of a processor-based device that can be accessed over the network 215.
In the embodiment illustrated in
As shown in
For the purposes of this discussion, the capture module 120 is considered to be in a “capture mode” once the user indicates that capture of information is desired. In one embodiment, the user may toggle in and out of the “capture mode” by providing an appropriate indication to either activate or deactivate the capture mode. Persons of ordinary skill in the art should also appreciate that any desirable number of users that may activate (at 305) the capture mode and may capture portions of any desirable number of electronic documents. Moreover, the number of users and the number of documents may change after the capture mode has been activated (at 305). For example, a user may open a new document or close an old document after the capture mode has been activated (at 305). For another example, one of a group of users may log-off after the capture mode has been activated (at 305).
The user may configure the capture mode before, during, or after activating (at 305) the capture mode. In one embodiment, the capture mode may be configured such that the portions of the electronic document to be selected by the user are associated with a delimiter. The delimiter may be a text string indicating a title, a chapter, a caption, a heading, a section, a numeral, a letter, and the like, or any other desirable object, such as an image, an icon, and the like. For example, as shown in
The capture mode may also be configured such that the selected portions of the electronic document are organized according to a selected order. For example, the selected portions of the electronic document may be organized according to the sequence in which the user selected each portion, alphabetically, and the like. Alternatively, the capture mode may be configured such that the selected portions of the electronic document are presented in a particular format, such as 12-point Times New Roman. The capture mode may also be configured such that the selected portions of the electronic document are presented in a selected file format, such as HTML, PDF, Word, Word Perfect, and the like.
When in the activated capture mode, the one or more users may then select (at 307) a portion of one or more electronic documents. As illustrated in
When in the capture mode, the user may select (at 307) additional portions of the electronic document. For example, as illustrated in
The capture module 120, 235 receives (at 310) at least one portion of an electronic document in response to a user selecting at least one portion of the electronic document based on the selected capture mode. For example, the portion of the electronic document may be a fragment of XML code including a text string. However, as discussed above, the portion of the electronic document is not limited text and may, in alternative embodiments, include images, hyperlinks, code fragments, embedded files, video clips or segments, sound clips, animations, and the like. Persons of ordinary skill in the art having the benefit of this disclosure will also appreciate that the portion of the electronic document may not be received (at 310) as a single entity or at one time. In various alternative embodiments, a plurality of portions of the electronic document may be received (at 310) at different times in response to the user selecting each of the plurality of portions of the electronic document.
The received selected portion of the electronic document may then be stored (at 320). In one embodiment, the received selected portion of the electronic document may be stored (at 320) in a storage space (e.g., memory, buffer, and the like) as an electronic document in a desired format, such as in XML format. Of course, in other embodiments, a format other than XML may be employed without deviating from the spirit and scope of the invention. For illustrative purposes, it is herein assumed that the received selected portion(s) of the electronic document are saved as an XML document.
In one embodiment, the received selected portion of the electronic document may be converted into an XML format using a predefined document type declaration before it is stored (at 320). As an example, the document type declaration may include definitions for outlines, tables of contents, paragraphs, and the like. The document type declaration for an outline may contain elements such as Title, Main topic, subtopic, details, and the like. If the user indicates that he or she wants to create an outline with the selected portion of the electronic document, the user may be prompted to indicate which part of the outline should contain the selected portion of the electronic document.
The capture module 120, 235 may, in one embodiment, transform (at 330) the stored portion of the electronic document into a desired format. For example, an XML document stored in the file or the memory buffer may be transformed (at 330) into an HTML document, a PDF document, a Word document, a rich text format document, and the like using a utility such as Extensible Style-sheet Language Transformations (XSLT). The stored portion of the electronic document may also be formatted (at 340) into an output file having a desired format. For example, the transformed XML document may be formatted (at 340) using a utility such as Extensible Style-sheet Language Formatting Objects (XSL-FO).
The information processed by the capture module 120, 235 can be provided (at 350) to the user in one of a variety of desirable ways. For example, as shown in
In the stand-alone embodiment shown in
The device 500 comprises a control unit 510, which in one embodiment may be a processor that is communicatively coupled to a storage unit 520. The software installed in the storage unit 520 may depend on the features to be performed by the device 500. For example, if the device 500 represents one of the processor-based devices 100, 205 then the storage unit 520 may include the capture module 120, the agents 230, or the capture module 235. The capture module 120, the agents 230, or the capture module 235 may be executable by the control unit 510. Although not shown, it should be appreciated that in one embodiment an operating system, such as Windows®, Disk Operating System®, Unix®, OS/2®, Linux®, MAC OS®, or the like, may be stored on the storage unit 520 and be executable by the control unit 510. The storage unit 520 may also include device drivers for the various hardware components of the device 500.
In the illustrated embodiment, the device 500 includes a display interface 530. The device 500 may display information on a display device 535 via the display interface 530. In the illustrated embodiment, a user may input information using an input device, such as a keyboard 540 and/or a mouse 545, through an input interface 550. The control unit 510 is coupled to a network interface 560, which may be adapted to receive, for example, a local area network card. In an alternative embodiment, the network interface 560 may be a Universal Serial Bus interface or an interface for wireless communications. The device 500 communicates with other devices through the network interface 560. Although not shown, associated with the network interface 560 may be a network protocol stack, with one example being a UDP/IP (User Datagram Protocol/Internet Protocol) stack or Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. In one embodiment, both inbound and outbound packets may be passed through the network interface 560 and the network protocol stack.
It should be appreciated that the block diagram of the device 500 of
The various system layers, routines, or modules may be executable control units, such as the control unit 510. The control unit 510 may include a microprocessor, a microcontroller, a digital signal processor, a processor card (including one or more microprocessors or controllers), or other control or computing devices. The storage devices referred to in this discussion may include one or more machine-readable storage media for storing data and instructions. The storage media may include different forms of memory including semiconductor memory devices such as dynamic or static random access memories (DRAMs or SRAMs), erasable and programmable read-only memories (EPROMs), electrically erasable and programmable read-only memories (EEPROMs) and flash memories; magnetic disks such as fixed, floppy, removable disks; other magnetic media including tape; and optical media such as compact disks (CDs) or digital video disks (DVDs). Instructions that make up the various software layers, routines, or modules in the various systems may be stored in respective storage devices. The instructions when executed by a respective control unit 510 cause the corresponding system to perform programmed acts.
By implementing one or more embodiments of the present invention, one or more of the following advantages may be realized. A user or a team of researchers may reduce the amount of time required to relocate information in one or more previously-read electronic documents. The present invention may also help readers reduce, or completely avoid, redundant effort when referring back to electronic documents such as online articles and e-books. Furthermore, disabled users could use this information to retrieve information more rapidly and to reference significant portions of the electronic document with less stress and effort.
The particular embodiments disclosed above are illustrative only, as the invention may be modified and practiced in different but equivalent manners apparent to those skilled in the art having the benefit of the teachings herein. Furthermore, no limitations are intended to the details of construction or design herein shown, other than as described in the claims below. It is therefore evident that the particular embodiments disclosed above may be altered or modified and all such variations are considered within the scope and spirit of the invention. Accordingly, the protection sought herein is as set forth in the claims below.
