SELECTING PORTIONS OF COMPUTER-ACCESSIBLE DOCUMENTS FOR POST-SELECTION PROCESSING

• US 20120192066A1
• Filed: 03/27/2012
• Published: 07/26/2012
• Est. Priority Date: 12/29/2009
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Fox, Joshua, Pelts, Michael, Rybak, Vladislav
• Granted Patent: US 9,886,159 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 715/273
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 21/6245 Protecting personal data, e.g. for financial or medical purposes
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/0481 based on specific properties of the displayed interaction object or a metaphor-based environment, e.g. interaction with desktop elements like windows or icons, or assisted by a cursor's changing behaviour or appearance
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/103 Formatting, i.e. changing of presentation of documents automatic justification G06F40/189; automatic line break hyphenation G06F40/191

Abstract

Processing documents by highlighting a portion of a document displayed on a computer display, where the portion is highlighted when a cursor is in a predefined location of the display relative to the location of the portion of the document, where the portion is identified as a candidate for selection for a post-selection operation prior to the cursor being in the predefined location of the display, and where the highlighting is done independent of any input received via a computer input device to indicate the extents of the portion, and recording a selection of the portion when an input that is predefined to indicate a selection action is received in association with the portion via a computer input device.

Claims

1. A method for processing documents, the method comprising:

highlighting a portion of a document displayed on a computer display,

wherein said portion is highlighted when a cursor is in a predefined location of said display relative to the location of said portion of said document,

wherein said portion is identified as a candidate for selection for a post-selection operation prior to said cursor being in said predefined location of said display, and

wherein said highlighting is done independent of any input received via a computer input device to indicate the extents of said portion; and

recording a selection of said portion when an input that is predefined to indicate a selection action is received in association with said portion via a computer input device.

2. The method of claim 1 wherein said highlighting step comprises highlighting said portion when any part of the cursor is co-located with any part of said portion.

3. The method of claim 1 wherein said highlighting step comprises highlighting said portion when any part of the cursor is within a predefined number of pixels of any part of said portion.

4. The method of claim 1 wherein said highlighting step comprises concurrently highlighting said portion and another portion of said document.

5. The method of claim 4 wherein said highlighting step comprises concurrently highlighting said portions wherein said highlighted portions are of the same semantic entity type or are of the same value or are variations of the same value in accordance with predefined variance criteria.

6. The method of claim 4 wherein said recording step comprises recording the selection of each of said portions when said selection action is received in association with one of said portions.

7. The method of claim 1 and further comprising:

accessing said document that is stored on a physically-tangible computer-readable medium;

identifying said portion of said document as said candidate for selection for said post-selection operation, wherein said identifying step comprises identifying said portion as said candidate when said portion meets a predefined candidate criterion; and

displaying said document on said computer display.

8. The method of claim 7 wherein said identifying step comprises identifying a plurality of portions of said document as candidates for selection for said post-selection operation, and further comprising consolidating two or more of said portions that are considered close to each other in accordance with a predefined closeness criterion into a single portion.

9. The method of claim 1 and further comprising performing said post-selection operation on said selected portion of said document.

10. The method of claim 9 wherein said performing step comprises withholding said selected portion from a requestor of said document who is not authorized to access said selected portion.

11-25. -25. (canceled)