Layout hierarchies for interactive design reuse

The advent of viable long tail & self-publishing solutions ([1], [2]) has spawned new requirements for automatic layout technologies. In most cases these attempt to lay out whole pages, spreads or documents based on complete content data. In this paper we introduce a new approach to document layout based on the principle of interactive design reuse, in which a new design is created from an existing high quality design via a sequence of simple steps to establish the final content. Based on our experience building such a system we propose a method of building layout hierarchies and discuss the implementation of editing operations appropriate to this new paradigm.