MaugVLink: Augmenting Mathematical Formulas with Visual Links

While mathematical formulas are widely applied across various fields, the abundance of information they contain poses challenges for comprehension. Understanding the meanings of individual symbols in formulas is a significant obstacle for readers. They have to shift their attention between formulas and their accompanying descriptions frequently. Colorizing the symbol and its corresponding definitions in the same color can build visual links to guide the readers’ attention and reduce the cognitive load, which is one of the most pervasive designs that can enhance the readability of formulas. However, the colorization process is tedious and time-consuming since the authors must manually locate these symbols and definitions and change their colors one by one. Therefore, we propose MaugVLink, a prototype of L
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X-based and AI-assisted authoring tool, to expedite these processes. With easy-to-use symbol selection UI design and human-AI collaboration mechanism, the author can rapidly build the visual links to augment the formulas. We also conduct a preliminary two-part user study with eight participants to evaluate the effectiveness and usefulness of MaugVLink.