Re: Adjusting float height on paged media

On Dec 22, 2008, at 17:09, Anton Prowse wrote:

> Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> This works when the adjacency of text and images is relatively  
>> elastic in the opinion of the author. However, in the case I  
>> currently have under consideration (case #1 in my previous email;  
>> cropping) float: left; and careful placement of each image next to  
>> a given paragraph is a relatively inelastic requirement. That is,  
>> float: left; is desired even if it causes both the image and text  
>> move to the next page.
>
> Then what you want is not really a float, at least not in the  
> traditional printed media sense of the word.

I'm pretty sure I want a float left/right in the CSS sense.

> Even if you weren't using floats but were using a table row (say),  
> an oversize image would cause the same "drop" that you describe, so  
> the issue you face is not about floats but about having more control  
> over image sizing and cropping.

Sure, very large images won't work anyway. However, a priori it is  
known that if the width of all the images is w, the height of each  
image is less than half of the available space on a page.

> In the end, it's very difficult to programatically control page  
> layout to that level of editorial demand; with even the most  
> sophisticated typesetting and page layout software the human touch  
> is required at the end to fix issues (particularly with regard to  
> the positioning of traditional floats).  Any attempted solution in a  
> non-wysiwyg system such as CSS is likely to be at least partly  
> unsatisfactory; it's the nature of the beast.

Sure, a more interactive view to the output of a print-oriented CSS  
formatter would be nice for final tweaking. Still, it seems that  
overall, if you have to choose between wysiwyg and a rule-based  
typesetter, a rule-based typesetter a better choice. (Making sure the  
layout parameters of all figures in a WYSIWYG app are consistent is no  
fun.)

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Monday, 22 December 2008 15:33:26 UTC