Textlets: Supporting Constraints and Consistency in Text Documents

Abstract

Writing technical documents frequently requires following constraints and consistently using domain-specific terms. We interviewed 12 legal professionals and found that they all use a standard word processor, but must rely on their memory to manage dependencies and maintain consistent vocabulary within their documents. We introduce Textlets, interactive objects that reify text selections into persistent items. We show how Textlets help manage consistency and constraints within the document, including selective search and replace, word count, and alternative wording. Eight participants tested a search-and-replace Textlet as a technology probe. All successfully interacted directly with the Textlet to perform advanced tasks; and most (6/8) spontaneously generated a novel replaceall-then-correct strategy. Participants suggested additional ideas, such as supporting collaborative editing over time by embedding a Textlet into the document to flag forbidden words. We argue that Textlets serve as a generative concept for creating powerful new tools for document editing.

Generative Theories of Interaction

“…We now illustrate how these principles directly guided the design of novel interaction techniques in two recent research projects. We describe the analytical, critical and generative power of Instrumental Interaction with two examples drawn from our own research: StickyLines [51], for graphical editing, and Textlets [71], for text editing.…”

“…Yet text editing has not changed very much over the past decades. In the context of the European Research Council project ONE (Unified Principles of Interaction), we interviewed two groups of professional users who rely on word processors for their work, namely contract lawyers and patent lawyers, to study how they manage the internal constraints and relationships that are critical to these documents, such as using the proper vocabulary consistently, meeting constraints such as word length, or maintain consistency between the claims and the body of a patent [71].…”

FileWeaver

“…File dependencies are detected by running Tracefile 9 on the trace recipe to track file accesses. The graph database is managed via the graph-tool library 10 . The back-end currently runs only on Linux due to the use of Tracefile and strace, but we are considering alternatives for Mac OS.…”

“…Commercial user interfaces for version control systems such as Gitkraken 3 and SourceTree 4 represent file revisions in a time-based tree visualization 5 , but these tools are designed primarily for coordinating work among programmers. Prior studies have found that scientists rarely use version control systems [15,28] and that knowledge workers mostly use manual versioning [14,10] because they find version control systems too complex. We find two limitations to these systems: They require users to explicitly specify relationships among files, and the relationships are presented as non-interactive graphs.…”

“…https://www.gnu.org/software/ 9 https://github.com/ole-tange/tangetools/blob/master/ tracefile/tracefile.pod, which is a wrapper around Linux's standard strace (https://linux.die.net/man/1/strace) 10. https://graph-tool.skewed.de/ 11 https://github.com/GNOME/nautilus 12 https://github.com/GNOME/nautilus-python 13 https://nwjs.io/…”