Effective Floating Strategies

Abstract

This paper presents an extension to the general framework for globally optimized pagination described in Mittelbach (2016). The extended algorithm supports automatic placement of floats as part of the optimization. It uses a flexible constraint model that allows for the implementation of typical typographic rules that can be weighted against each other to support different application scenarios. By "flexible" we mean that the rules of typographic presentation of the content of a document element are not fixed---but neither are they completely arbitrary; also, some of these rules are absolute whereas others are in the form of preferences. It is easy to see that without restrictions the float placement possibilities grow exponentially if the number of floats has a linear relation to the document size. It is therefore important to restrict the objective function used for optimization in a way that the algorithm does not have to evaluate all theoretically possible placements while still being guaranteed to find an optimal solution. Different objective functions are being evaluated against typical typographic requirements in order to arrive at a system that is both rich in its expressiveness of modeling a large class of pagination applications and at the same time is capable of solving the optimization problem in acceptable time for realistic input data. 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, pages 11--20.