Intentions in the Coordinated Generation of Graphics and Text from Tabular Data

Abstract.

To use graphics efficiently in an automatic report generation system, one has to model messages and how they go from the writer (intention) to the reader (interpretation). This paper describes PostGraphe, a system which generates a report integrating graphics and text from a set of writer's intentions. The system is given the data in tabular form as might be found in a spreadsheet; also input is a declaration of the types of values in the columns of the table. The user then indicates the intentions to be conveyed in the graphics (e.g., compare two variables or show the evolution of a set of variables) and the system generates a report in LATEX with the appropriate PostScript graphic files. PostGraphe uses the same information to generate the accompanying text that helps the reader to focus on the important points of the graphics. We also describe how these ideas have been embedded to create a new Chart Wizard for Microsoft Excel.