Hi, Vincent has made a very interesting initiative with his unified approach to page and line breaking. I always felt that it was too ambitious, but Vincent has taken the leap, and proved himself right by providing a prototype. I tested the prototype with some texts of myself, and the results looked good. The dot files illustrating the results are a very nice feature. Now I am trying to understand his approach in more detail. I have little time, so I am going slowly.
The fact that the prototype is written in Ruby does not help. I have never worked with Ruby before, so I have to get used to new syntax. More importantly, I do not have good tools for Ruby. When I try to understand code, I do not only read it. I also make extensive use of a debugger. This allows me to see what the code actually does to variables, in this case e.g. how the code fills the various layouts variables, and links them back to earlier layouts. Is there a plugin for Ruby in Eclipse that allows me to do this? Or is there another useful tool that can help me here? I think it would be useful if it can be proven in some way that this approach allows one in principle to take side floats into account. That is, different line widths on a page, based on offset on the page. And also calculate the demerits of alternative placements of such a side float, such as on this page or on the next one. No actual implementation but the firm conviction that such an extension fits into the framework. Regards, Simon -- Simon Pepping home page: http://www.leverkruid.eu
