GACA: Group-Aware Command-based Arrangement of Graphic Elements

Many graphic applications rely on command-based arrangement tools to achieve precise layouts. Traditional tools are designed to operate on a single group of elements that are distributed consistently with the arrangement axis implied by a command. This often demands a process with repeated element selections and arrangement commands to achieve 2D layouts involving multiple rows and/or columns of well aligned and/or distributed elements. Our work aims to reduce the numbers of selection operation and command invocation, since such reductions are particularly beneficial to professional designers who design lots of layouts. Our key idea is that an issued arrangement command is in fact very informative, instructing how to automatically decompose a 2D layout into multiple 1D groups, each of which is compatible with the command. We present a parameter-free, command-driven grouping approach so that users can easily predict our grouping results. We also design a simple user interface with pushpins to enable explicit control of grouping and arrangement. Our user study confirms the intuitiveness of our technique and its performance improvement over traditional command-based arrangement tools.