Constraint Techniques for Authoring Multimedia Documents

Authoring a multimedia document requires to specify both its spatial layout and its temporal organization, i.e. when and where objects such as pictures, texts and videos appear/disappear on /from the screen and when objects such as audios and videos start/end to play. In this paper, we present some benefits authors can gain when using an authoring tool in which constraints are used to specify these two kinds of information. We describe our experience in building Madeus, a constraint-based environment to design multimedia documents and we point out technical problems that still need to be solved to more completely satisfy author requirements.