Despite the ubiquity of slide presentations, managing multiple presentations remains a challenge. Understanding how multiple versions of a presentation are related to one another, assembling new presentations from existing presentations, and collaborating to create and edit presentations are difficult tasks. In this paper, we explore techniques for comparing and managing multiple slide presentations. We propose a general comparison framework for computing similarities and differences between slides. Based on this framework we develop an interactive tool for visually comparing multiple presentations. The interactive visualization facilitates understanding how presentations have evolved over time. We show how the interactive tool can be used to assemble new presentations from a collection of older ones and to merge changes from multiple presentation authors. Comparison framework: We develop a framework for comparing presentations to identify the subsets of slides that are similar across each version. There are a number of ways to measure similarity between presentations, including pixel-level image differences between slides, differences between the text on each slide, etc. We propose several such distance measures and discuss how they reveal the underlying similarities and differences between presentations. Interactive visualization: We provide an interactive tool for viewing multiple versions of a presentation. Users can examine differences between presentations along any of the distance measures computed by our comparison framework. The visualization is designed to help users understand how the presentation has evolved from version to version and determine when different portions crystallized into final form. Users can identify sections of the presentation that changed repeatedly. Such volatility might indicate problematic areas of the presentation and can help users understand the work that went into producing the presentation. Interactive assembly: Our interactive tool also facilitates assembly of new presentations from the existing versions. Users can select subsets of slides from any version and copy them into a new presentation. The tight integration of visualization and assembly allows users to see the history of a presentation and combine relevant parts into the new presentation. Such an assembly tool is especially useful for collaborative production of presentations. Authors can independently edit the presentation and then use our assembly tool to decide which portions of each version to coalesce into the final presentation.
To this end, a presentation composition system was developed to visually compare between different versions of the same slides REF .
Comparing and managing multiple versions of slide presentations
UIST
Computer Science