Globally optimal page breaking with column balancing: a case study
Article No.: 33, Pages 1 - 4
Abstract
The paper presents a dynamic programming algorithm that finds the globally optimal sequence of page breaks for a book avoiding widows and orphans when the only source of variation is the possibility to break selected paragraphs into varying number of lines by skillful selection of line breaks. The text is set in two-columns, on each last page of a chapter the columns must be balanced. We show how the balancing process can be included in the global optimization.
The algorithm is applied to a real-life problem of typesetting a small-format two-column 800 pages long dictionary. We analyze the typesetting process including the proofing phase where local changes in the text can globally influence page breaks.
This problem provides an ideal test-bed for global optimization since the typographic model involved is relatively easy - the material processed is merely a stream of paragraphs. On the other hand, breaking the book under these conditions is a very tedious and frustrating job for a human typesetter, as it typically requires hours of trial and error.
References
[1]
Paolo Ciancarini, Angelo Di Iorio, Luca Furini, and Fabio Vitali. 2012. High-quality Pagination for Publishing. Software Prac. Experience 42, 6 (June 2012), 733--751. https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.1096
[2]
Nathan Hurst, Wilmot Li, and Kim Marriott. 2009. Review of Automatic Document Formatting. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering (DocEng '09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 99--108. https://doi.org/10.1145/1600193.1600217
[3]
Donald E. Knuth. 1984. The TEXbook. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts.
[4]
Donald E. Knuth and Michael F. Plass. 1981. Breaking Paragraphs into Lines. Software--Practice and Experience 11 (1981), 1119--1184.
[5]
Frank Mittelbach. 2016. A General Framework for Globally Optimized Pagination. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Symposium on Document Engineering (DocEng '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 11--20. https://doi.org/10.1145/2960811.2960820
[6]
Tadeusz Piotrowski and Zygmunt Saloni. 2002. New English-Polish and Polish-English dictionary. Wilga, Warszawa.
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Michael Frederick Plass. 1981. Optimal Pagination Techniques for Automatic Typesetting Systems. Ph.D. Dissertation. Stanford University.
Index Terms
- Globally optimal page breaking with column balancing: a case study
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September 2019
254 pages
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Published: 23 September 2019
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