Textoshop: Interactions Inspired by Drawing Software to Facilitate Text Editing

TL;DR

Textoshop challenges conventional text editors by importing drawing-software interactions to enable direct manipulation, layering, and tonal exploration of text. By treating words as pixels and tones as colors, it supports non-linear editing, boolean fragment operations, and meaning-preserving transformations, with a tone picker and text layers that structure revisions. A within-subject user study shows Textoshop users achieve higher success and usability, preferring the approach over a traditional baseline and reporting more control and efficiency in editing tasks. The work highlights the potential of cross-domain interface metaphors to redesign digital writing workflows and invites further research into broader applications and long-term adoption.

Abstract

We explore how interactions inspired by drawing software can help edit text. Making an analogy between visual and text editing, we consider words as pixels, sentences as regions, and tones as colours. For instance, direct manipulations move, shorten, expand, and reorder text; tools change number, tense, and grammar; colours map to tones explored along three dimensions in a tone picker; and layers help organize and version text. This analogy also leads to new workflows, such as boolean operations on text fragments to construct more elaborated text. A study shows participants were more successful at editing text and preferred using the proposed interface over existing solutions. Broadly, our work highlights the potential of interaction analogies to rethink existing workflows, while capitalizing on familiar features.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: Direct manipulations on text selections edit the text: () dragging moves the selection anywhere on the canvas; () resizing shortens or expands the text; () rotating changes the order of the words.
• Figure 2: The tone picker allows exploring tone nuances of a sentence. Here, the selected sentence is "Alice was beginning to get very tired" and variations are explored by moving the thumb in the tone wheel and by changing the tone sliders.
• Figure 3: Dragging text over a passage allows merging the two passages in different ways: () "Unite" merges the two passages; () "Intersect" preserves only the information shared by both passages; () "Subtract" removes the information in one passage from the other; and () "Exclude" removes the information shared by both passages.
• Figure 4: Text layers are stacked on top of each other: (a) each layer may store text anchored at different text locations; (b) layers at the top might hide the text underneath; (c) layers can be hidden; and (d) text is reflowed to avoid gaps
• Figure 5: Participants' response when rating the 5-point statements for (a) Textoshop and (b) baseline. (c) Dots are the mean differences of Textoshop compared to baseline. Bars are the 95% CIs calculated with the studentized bootstrap method.