AutoTR: Efficient Reformatting Text Spread out in a DOM Tree for Text-Analytic Applications

Abstract

We present an efficient algorithm to automatically reformat text contained in multiple nodes that are spread out in a DOM tree of an HTML file converted from a PDF document. Reformatting text on the fly is needed for hierarchical reading and other text-analytic applications. A naive approach would traverse the DOM tree multiple times, failing to meet the requirement of real-time reformatting. Our algorithm meets the real-time requirement by indexing text nodes and sentences with a pair of tag holders inserted into each text node to allow fast reformatting.