ABSTRACT
The diffusion of word and graphics processors over the past decade has improved the technical quality of documents, but not their design. Although the very perfection of the printed page raises readers’ expectations, it also draws attention to any deficiencies. Spreadsheets and statistics packages commonly offer tools for generating charts and often provide tutorials in their use. A successful implementation for a specific application area has been done by Feiner, who used a rule-based system for generating appropriate visualizations to draw the focus of attention to the relevant parts of the radio described in the manual. Geometrical aspects in graphics are expressed by analogical rather than propositional values. Coordinates are well suited for the generation of a display but are the way humans describe graphics. Reasoning about analogical values is difficult; the adaptation of Allen’s temporal logic for space is an often-cited approach, which, however, allows only for a very limited reasoning about relative positioning of objects.
