Document visualization on small displays

Limitation in display size and resolution on mobile devices is one of the main obstacles for wide-spread use of web applications in a wireless environment. Web pages are often too large for a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) screen to present. The same problem exists for devices with low resolution such as WebTV. Manual reconstruction of web pages for these devices would ease the problem; however, the large variation of display capabilities will greatly increase the burden of web page designers since they have to customize a web page for each possible display device. In this paper, we propose a document segmentation and presentation system. The system automatically divides a web document into a number of logical segments based on the screen size and the structure and content of the document. Additional information such as overviews and summaries is also extracted to facilitate navigation. The system presents the segments and structural information of a web document to make full use of the screen for information finding.