How LiveInk Works

The LiveInk text engineering method aims to more fully exploit the rich capacity of the visual system for complex representation, while ameliorating the self-defeating attributes of text formatting conventions that were developed when text recording media were limited by the cost of paper.

The great reading opportunity of electronic text is that the text content, now in digital form, can be read by a machine. LiveInk takes advantage of this machine-readability to analyze the text content for:

• Syntax
• Other Grammatical Attributes
• Punctuation
• Word Difficulty
• Pronunciation

LiveInk then takes the results of this analysis to give shape to the presentation of the text. Since language (and the conceptual structure it represents) is multi-layered and multi-dimensional, then it stands to reason that text - the spatial system that represents spoken language - should also be multi-layered and multi-dimensional. So LiveInk transforms the text by:

• Limiting the length of the lines to two or three eye spans, and varying the contours of the sides of paragraphs with varying indentations, thus reducing the competition for visual attention associated with conventional block text.
• Breaking the lines at the most important syntactic boundaries, alleviating the visual processing problems associated with the random "carriage returns" of block text.
• Varying the spacial position of the lines to denote syntactic interrelationships within the text segments, and to visually differentiate the part of speech of words and word groups.

Thus LiveInk creates patterns which make the text easier to read and comprehend. These patterns exploit both spatial relationships and language to represent the conceptual structure of the text, enabling the eye and the mind to work together to build meaning in the mind of the reader.

In other words, LiveInk transforms this:

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Into this: