Re: Pagination of Documents

[Jeff Kingston]

> just by chance I found a web-site about 'the pagination problem of
> complex documents' ... Dominikus
 
Thanks for this.  I've just downloaded it and read the abstract.
They use dynamic programming to find optimal page layouts in time
proportional to the number of lines times the number of floating
displays.  Their measure is the number of page turns required
to find everything referred to, which (unless I'm missing something
that will show up in the body of the document) means that they
make no attempt to fill up each page evenly.  Still, it seems
like an interesting line of investigation.  They say they have
written an entire book on the subject.

Algorithms like this have an interesting bearing on the design
of document formatting systems.  Just as programming language
implementations offer advanced features (recursion, garbage
collection, ... ) because of their usefulness, so a document
formatting system has to offer algorithms like this one.  (Lout
offers optimal paragraph breaking following Knuth, and the
option of using the same algorithm to break pages, although
without any special awareness of where floating figures are
going - which is usually fine unless there are a lot of them.)

Jeff