Methods and systems for generating enhanced thumbnails

A method for generating an enhanced thumbnail of a document, comprising:

• obtained a document comprising a plurality of elements;
• modifying an appearance of at least one visible element of the plurality of elements in the document;
• generating a reduced-size representation associated with the document, in which the modified at least one visible element retains a modified appearance relative to other elements of the document;
• and
• modifying an appearance of at least one of the plurality of elements in the reduced-size representation after generating the reduced-size representation by automatically overlaying an overlay element on or near the reduced-size representation in association with the at least one visible element based on importance of the at least one visible element, the overlay element comprising one or more of an enlarged version of the visible element, a zoom of the visible element, a callout visibly connected with the visible element, a blurry text version of the visible element, and a perspective text version of the visible element.

A method for generating an enhanced thumbnail associated with a document, comprising:

• obtaining a document comprising a plurality of elements;
• generating a reduced image of the document;
• identifying at least one visible element of the plurality of elements as an important element;
• and
• modifying an appearance of the at least one important element relative to other elements of the plurality of elements in the reduced-size representation by automatically overlaying a semi-transparent modified version of the important element on or near the reduced-size representation that allows an underlying portion of the reduced-size representation to be partially visible, based on importance of the at least one visible element.

An apparatus for generating an enhanced thumbnail associated with a document, comprising:

• a renderer that generates a reduced-size representation of the document;
• and
• a document format modifier that modifies an appearance of at least one visible element of a plurality of elements of a document while the at least one element is in a document format,
• wherein the document format modifier modifies the appearance of the at least one visible element in the reduced-size representation by automatically overlaying an overlay element on or near the reduced-size representation in association with the at least one visible element based on importance of the at least one visible element, the overlay element comprising one or more of an enlarged version of the visible element, a zoom of the visible element, a callout visibly connected with the visible element, a blurry text version of the visible element, and a perspective text version of the visible element.

An apparatus for generating an enhanced thumbnail associated with a document, comprising:

• a renderer that generates a reduced image of a document containing a plurality of visible elements;
• an important element extractor that extracts at least one important element from the plurality of visible elements;
• and
• at least one of (a) a document format modifier that modifies an appearance of the at least one important element while the at least one important element is in a document format, and (b) an image modifier that modifies an appearance of the at least one important element in the reduced-size representation,
• wherein the at least one important element is modified by automatically overlaying a semi-transparent modified version of the at least one important element on or near the reduced-size representation that allows an underlying portion of the important element of the reduced-size representation to be partially visible based on importance of the at least one visible element.