Textoshop: Interactions Inspired by Drawing Software to Facilitate Text Editing

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.