Abstract
The compact and harmonious layout of ads and text is a fundamental and costly step in the production of commercial telephone directories (“Yellow Pages”). We formulate a canonical version of Yellow-Pages pagination and layout (YPPL) as an optimization problem in which the task is to position ads and text-stream segments on sequential pages so as to minimize total page length and maximize certain layout aesthetics, subject to constraints derived from page-format requirements and positional relations between ads and text. We present a heuristic-search approach to the YPPL problem. Our algorithm has been applied to a sample of real telephone-directory data, and produces solutions that are significantly shorter and better than the published ones.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Explore related subjects
Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.References
Černy, V. (1985). “A Thermodynamical Approach to the Travelling Salesman Problem: An Efficient Simulation Algorithm,” Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications 45, 41–51.
Chew, Hong-Gian, Moung Liang, Philip Koh, Daniel Ong, and Jen-Hoon Tan. (1994) “ALEXIS: An Intelligent Layout Tool for Publishing.” In Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence. Seattle, WA, pp. 41–47.
ChristensenJon, JoeMarks, and StuartShieber. (1995). “An Empirical Study of Algorithms for Point Feature Label Placement,” ACM Transactions on Graphics 14(3), 203–232.
DavisLawrence (1991). Handbook of Genetic Algorithms. New York, NY: Van Nostrand Reinhold.
FurutaRichard, JeffreySchofield, and AlanShaw. (1982). “Document Formatting Systems: Survey, Concepts, and Issues,” ACM Computing Surveys 14(3), 417–472.
Graf, W.H., S. Neurohr and R.G. Goebel. (1996). “YPPS-A Constraint-Based Tool for the Pagination of Yellow-Page Directories.” Technical Report, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) GmbH.
Harada, Mikako, Andrew Witkin, and David Baraff. (1995). “Interactive Physically-Based Manipulation of Discrete/Continuous Models.” In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH' 95. Los Angeles, CA, pp. 199–208.
Iwai, Isamu, Miwako Doi, Koji Yamaguchi, Mika Fukui, and Yoichi Takebayashi. (1989). “A Document Layout System using Automatic Document Architecture Extraction.” In Proceedings of CHI'89. Austin, TX, pp. 369–374.
Kirkpatrick, S., C.D.GelattJr., and M.P.Vecchi (1983). “Optimization by Simulated Annealing,” Science 220, 671–680.
Knuth, Donald E. and Michael F.Plass (1981). “Breaking Paragraphs into Lines,” Software-Practive and Experience 11, 1119–1184.
NYNEX Information Resources. (1994). NYNEX Yellow Pages: Boston area, area code 617.
NYNEX Information Resources. (1995). NYNEX Yellow Pages: Boston area, area code 617.
Peels, Arno J.H.M., Norbert J.M.Janssen, and WopNawjin. (1985). “Document Architecture and Text Formatting,” ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems 3(4), 347–369.
Plass, Michael Frederick. (1981). “Optimal Pagination Techniques for Automatic Typesetting Systems.” Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University.
Rosenking, Jeffrey P., Howard J. Marmostein, Eva M. Baron-Vartian, and Robert W. Soccio. (1991). “A Generic System for Directory Pagination.” In Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Developing and Managing Expert System Programs, pp. 166–169.
RumlWheeler, J.Thomas Ngo, JoeMarks, and Stuart M.Shieber. (1996) “Easily Searched Encodings for Number Partitioning,” Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications 89(2), 251–291.
Weitzman, Louis and Kent Wittenburg. (1994). “Automatic Presentation of Multimedia Documents Using Relational Grammars”. In Proceedings of the Second Annual ACM Conference on Multimedia, San Francisco, CA, pp. 443–451.
Yellow Pages Publishers Association. (1995). Yellow Pages Industry Facts & Media Guide, 1995–1996 Edition.
ZorasterSteven. (1991). “Expert Systems and the Map Label Placement Problem,” Cartographica 28(1), 1–9, Spring.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Johari, R., Marks, J., Partovi, A. et al. Automatic Yellow-Pages pagination and layout. J Heuristics 2, 321–342 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00132503
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00132503