Re: Adjusting float height on paged media

I agree with much of what both Anton and Henri
have written.  Having very recently finished
typesetting my annual Christmas letter, which
has 13 floated images scattered across ten
completely full A4 pages, I can personally attest
to Anton's

> 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)

and Henri's

> [I]f you have to choose between wysiwyg and a rule-based 
 > typesetter, a rule-based typesetter a better choice.

Even the smallest change to the content tended to
provoke one or more images into falling partly
off the bottom of a page, and it is hard to imagine
the complexity of a typesetting engine that could
cope with the implicit constraint-based logic without
any need for human intervention.

Philip TAYLOR

Received on Monday, 22 December 2008 16:08:57 UTC