Patent ID: 7222306

Claim:
A method of displaying a web page comprising: accessing a web page's contents, including one or more images and one or more strings of displayable text, where the contents of said web page do not specify a designated layout position for each of said images and text; laying out the web page in a layout space having a horizontal and a vertical layout resolution, so as to determine a layout position in said layout space for each of said images and each portion of one of said strings that is to be displayed on a separate line in said layout space, said laying out including: treating said images and characters of said displayable text as having respective layout sizes in said layout space; flowing displayable characters of said strings across line boundaries, based on the layout size of said displayable characters, by breaking portions of strings that cross a line boundary into separate single line strings, each of which fits on a single line in said layout space; and displaying at least a portion of said laid out web page in a display shown on a display screen at a selected scale factor, including: displaying both said images and single line character strings at locations in said display corresponding to the positions at which they have been laid out in said layout space, scaled as a function of said selected scale factor; representing each of said images in said display by a corresponding bitmap in said display that has a pixel size relative to the image's layout size determined as a function of said selected scale factor; and representing a given single line strings by an image composed from a plurality of separate font bitmaps representing the characters in said string, where the image of an individual character of said string has a pixel size relative to the character's layout size determined as a function of said selected scale factor; wherein: said displaying of a portion of said laid out web page is performed at each of at least two different selected scale factors; and the shape and pixel alignment of a character represented by one of said font bitmap at a given scale factor has been selected to improve readability as a function of the size of said font bitmap used to represent the character at the given scale factor, causing a given character in a given string in two displayings of a given portion of said web page layout performed at different selected scale factors to be displayed with font bitmaps of different pixel size that represent the given character with different shapes and pixel alignments.