Patent ID: 6975335

Claim:
A method of displaying a diagram in an altered state containing magnified or reduced areas of the diagram, comprising the steps of: a) storing diagram linkage information as to how display information as to portions of a diagram are affected as to two or more of length, size, shade of color and pattern density when a certain portion of data in the diagram is magnified or reduced with respect to other portions of the diagram; b) uniformly magnifying or reducing the certain portion of the diagram all with a single designated magnification or reduction ratio; c) magnifying or reducing at least one but not all of the other portions of the diagram other than the magnified or reduced portion of the diagram in accordance with the diagram linkage information to compensate for changes in the at least one line; d) obtaining display specification information characterizing the magnification or reduction ratio of each portion of the diagram; and e) displaying each portion of the diagram based on the display specification information characterizing each magnified or reduced portions magnification or reduction ratio wherein at least one of the shade of color and pattern density of changed portions of the diagram and the corresponding portions of the scale are changed in correspondence to the magnification or reduction ratios of these changed portions to distinguish such changed portions from one another and from portions of the diagram that have not been magnified or reduced in steps b) and c) so that the portions of the diagram are characterized differently depending on their magnification or reduction ratio in the display wherein said diagram is lines of alphanumeric characters and said certain portion is a magnified area of the characters including some but not all characters on some but not all lines of said characters and said reduced portions are characters in a frame surrounding said magnified area that includes characters surrounding the magnified area where the characters in both the magnified and reduced areas retain their character shape.