Patent attributes
A method and apparatus for displaying the evolution of an electronic document (e.g. word-processing document, portable-document-format file, spreadsheet, drawing, and the like), containing tracked changes, is disclosed. In accordance with the disclosed method and apparatus, the revisions of an electronic document may be treated as parent frames. In between the parent frames, child frames may be constructed from the combined images of their parent frames. To form a child frame, an image of a parent frame has a degree of translucency as it is combined with the translucent image of the other parent frame, such that every child frame contains traces of the images of both its parent frames. An input device (e.g. keyboard, mouse, touchpad, stylus, voice activation, and the like) may be used to control the frame visible to the user at any one time. The user may use the input device to traverse the frames at various speeds and in either direction, creating the visual illusion that a certain revision of the document is being morphed into its future revisions—or stripped off its changes as it is morphed into previous revisions—depending on the direction chosen by the user.
