Currently working on reducing differences between three recent related codebases to do with text layout:
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Table layouter: choose column widths & row heights that make a table fairly compact, which tends to make the table look nicer and easier to read.
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Text-in-shape: Have text that flows around figures, even if those figures are non-rectangular. Uses whole-document optimal line-breaking. Allows making the text ~exactly fit into the available space (like you want in a newspaper or magazine) by finding the value of some “size” parameter that controls how big the text is relative to the available space: which might increase the size of the figures, font size, leading, move some of the figures further into the text, or whatever the designer wants. (We haven't written a gui for specifying complex parameterizations, just the software for finding the parameter value for given text.)
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Optimal float placement in multi-column documents. I.e. placing each float (figure, table, sidebar or the like) so that it's near the text that refers to it, while satisfying some layout constraints notably including “doesn't overlap other floats”. (The fact that floats (and text) can't overlap each other is what gives the problem its computational complexity.)
Each of these uses some subset of XHTML as its input format, but with different capabilities depending on what was important or difficult for each project:
- The table code has very limited facilities for styling text, and the input document must consist solely of a single table.
- Neither the text-in-shape code nor the multicolumn float-placement code handle tables. (Nor does the table code handle cells containing a nested table.)
- The multicolumn float-placement code recently acquired support for a CSS stylesheet (using libcroco) and simple support for bullets.
So I'm now reducing differences between the codebases of these three: it would be nice if all of them supported CSS and all of them supported tables and all of them supported paragraph shaping like bullets, and so on.