The document lens

This paper describes a general visualization technique based on a common strategy for understanding paper documents when their structure is not known, whiclh is to lay the pages of a document in a rectangular array on a large table where the overall structure and distinguishing features can be seen. Given such a presentation, the user wants to quickly view parts of the presentation in detail while remaining in context. A fisheye view or a magnifying lens might be used for this, but they fail to adequately show the global context. The Document Lens is a 3D visualization for large rectangular presentations that allows the user to quickly focus on a part of a presentation while continuously remaining in context. The user grabs a rectangular lens and pulls it around to focus on the desired area at the desired magnification. The presentation outside the lens is stretched to provide a continuous display of the global context. This stretching is efficiently implemented with affine transformations, allowing text documents to be viewed as a whole with an interactive visualization.