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Toward tighter tables

Published: 02 November 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Tables are provided in virtually all document formatting systems and are one of the most powerful and useful design elements in current web document standards. Unfortunately, optimal layout of tables which contain text is NP-hard for reasonable layout requirements such as minimizing table height for a given width [1]. We present two new independently-applicable techniques for table layout. The first technique is to solve a continuous approximation to the original layout problem by using a constant-area approximation of the cell content combined with a minimum width and height for the cell. The second technique starts by setting each column to its narrowest possible width and then iteratively reduces the height of the table by judiciously widening its columns. This second technique uses the actual text and line-break rules rather than the constant-area approximation used by the first technique. We also investigate two hybrid approaches both of which use iterative column widening to improve the quality of an initial solution found using a different technique. In the first hybrid approach we use the continuous approximation technique to compute the initial column widths while in the second hybrid approach a modification of the HTML table layout algorithm is used to compute the initial widths. We found that all four techniques are reasonably fast and give sig-nificantly more compact layout than that of HTML layout engines.

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D. Raggett, A. L. Hors, and I. Jacobs. HTML 4.01 Specification, section 'Autolayout Algorithm'. http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/appendix/notes.html#h-B.5.2, 1999.
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Cited By

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  • (2023)FormaT5: Abstention and Examples for Conditional Table Formatting with Natural LanguageProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3632093.363211117:3(497-510)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2023
  • (2023)Cornet: Learning Table Formatting Rules By ExampleProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3603581.360360016:10(2632-2644)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2023
  • (2023)GetPt: Graph-enhanced General Table Pre-training with Alternate Attention NetworkProceedings of the 29th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining10.1145/3580305.3599366(941-950)Online publication date: 6-Aug-2023
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cover image ACM Conferences
DocEng '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM symposium on Document engineering
November 2005
252 pages
ISBN:1595932402
DOI:10.1145/1096601
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 02 November 2005

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Author Tags

  1. conic programming
  2. optimisation techniques
  3. table layout

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DocEng05
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DocEng05: ACM Symposium on Document Engineering
November 2 - 4, 2005
Bristol, United Kingdom

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Overall Acceptance Rate 194 of 564 submissions, 34%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)FormaT5: Abstention and Examples for Conditional Table Formatting with Natural LanguageProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3632093.363211117:3(497-510)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2023
  • (2023)Cornet: Learning Table Formatting Rules By ExampleProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3603581.360360016:10(2632-2644)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2023
  • (2023)GetPt: Graph-enhanced General Table Pre-training with Alternate Attention NetworkProceedings of the 29th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining10.1145/3580305.3599366(941-950)Online publication date: 6-Aug-2023
  • (2015)Automatic Minimal-Height Table LayoutINFORMS Journal on Computing10.1287/ijoc.2014.063727:3(449-461)Online publication date: Aug-2015
  • (2013)HTML Automatic Table LayoutACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB)10.1145/2435215.24352197:1(1-27)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2013
  • (2011)Optimal automatic table layoutProceedings of the 11th ACM symposium on Document engineering10.1145/2034691.2034697(23-32)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2011
  • (2011)Building table formatting toolsProceedings of the 11th ACM symposium on Document engineering10.1145/2034691.2034696(13-22)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2011
  • (2010)A new model for automated table layoutProceedings of the 10th ACM symposium on Document engineering10.1145/1860559.1860594(169-176)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2010
  • (2009)Review of automatic document formattingProceedings of the 9th ACM symposium on Document engineering10.1145/1600193.1600217(99-108)Online publication date: 16-Sep-2009
  • (2007)Approximating text by its areaProceedings of the 2007 ACM symposium on Document engineering10.1145/1284420.1284458(147-150)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2007
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