Any attempt FOP has at laying rules for layout is going to be applying heuristics. It would be interesting to be able to expose the heuristics and allow for programmer/user control of them. Still, until more of this materializes, I think we're getting famous French mathematicians before the equine species (...getting DesCartes before the horse, or "de cart before the horse"...bad joke)
-----Original Message----- From: Clay Leeds [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, January 29, 2003 10:18 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: source for hz algorithm Peter B. West wrote: > Victor Mote wrote: > >> Peter B. West wrote: >> >> >>> These are interesting and important issues. I had no notion of the HZ >>> algorithm, but I was dimly aware from my reading as a teenager of the >>> "rivers" problem, and acutely conscious of its distracting effect from >>> my reading. In my thinking about layout, I have been conscious of the >>> need to be able to evaluate such issues at a high level. The only way >>> such an evaluation can be done is by layout look-ahead. The page must >>> be laid out before "rivers" can be assessed. (Finding them would be an >>> interesting problem in itself - and no doubt part of HZ.) >> >> >> >> It actually would seem to go beyond look-ahead, and instead be more along >> the lines of laying the content out multiple times & scoring each one. > > > True, but I had in mind that any such approach will be built on the fact > that any layout is, in some sense, tentative. Rhett raised the question > some time ago of a means recording (and scoring) intermediate results, > something which will be an essential element of such a solution. > > At this stage, I would tend to think not of doing every possible layout, > but of following the "optimum" values to perform initial layout, and > then testing the result for "goodness". The minimum-maximum range > provides the slack - within the context of the spec - for applying > whatever other set of layout tuning algorithms that FOP implements. > > I would see these being arranged as a set of heuristics - for want of a > better word - that are applied in a structured fashion to detected > layout conflicts of particular types. What comprises a conflict would > be determined by those configurable parameters. > > In the initial version, we only need to provide for the most basic of > these, as long as the mechanism is general enough to allow for refinement. Does the idea that there would be intermediate results mean that a "human" could determine which is the best to perform the final layout? I'm thinking of a system similar to how some OCR programs enable the user to contribute to the process of recognition when the OCR program has problems determining a word or character. (FYI: OCR=Optical Character Recognition--used in scanning text-based documents which are converted to text for archiving, indexing, etc.). If so, could the implementation offer some way of "saving" the best method? I would think it would work like a userconfig file. -- Clay Leeds - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web Developer - Medata, Inc. - http://www.medata.com PGP Public Key: https://mail.medata.com/pgp/cleeds.asc --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
