Guided tours and tabletops: tools for communicating in a hypertext environment

The author of a complex hypertext document is often faced with the problem of conveying the document's meaning to future readers through a shared computer environment. Two tools implemented in the NoteCards hypertext environment, guided tours and tabletops, allow authors to employ annotation, graphic layout, and ordered presentation when communicating to readers. This paper describes these tools and gives examples of their use. Issues of remote pointing arising from an application in legal argumentation are discussed as well as early work on the use of these tools to support sharing of hypertext strategies among NoteCards users.