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Visual Compiler: Towards Translating Digital UI Design Draft to Front-End Code Automatically

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12185))

Abstract

One assignment of a front-end engineer is to transform the User Interface (UI) design drafts to arrangements with program compatibilities. To furnish the customer requirement, engineers usually need to consider various factors for different terminal devices such as a wide range of screen sizes. Such process usually contains a lot of tedious work and much of them is repetitive which can be done by machine. In this paper, we propose Visual Compiler, a tool trying to bridge the gap between UI design draft and front-end code. We combine expert heuristics and techniques in computer vision to improve the readability and usability of generated code, making the generation process more intelligently. In practice, users just need to input the design drafts obtained from UI designers, then our method can produce clean and well-organized front-end code. Compared with existing approaches, Visual Compiler is able to reduce the size of output files by approximately 80% while maintaining the same appearance as in the original draft. We hope our tool can help UI designers and front-end developers collaborate more efficiently.

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Correspondence to Jiemao Pan .

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Pan, J. et al. (2020). Visual Compiler: Towards Translating Digital UI Design Draft to Front-End Code Automatically. In: Yamamoto, S., Mori, H. (eds) Human Interface and the Management of Information. Interacting with Information. HCII 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12185. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50017-7_28

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50017-7_28

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-50016-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-50017-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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