Balancing font sizes for flexibility in automated document layout.

ABSTRACTThis paper presents an improved approach for automatically laying out content onto a document page, where the number and size of the items are unknown in advance. Our solution leverages earlier results from Oliveira (2008) wherein layouts are modeled by a guillotine partitioning of the page. The benefit of such method is its efficiency and ability to place as many items on a page as desired. In our model, items have flexible representations and texts may freely change their font sizes to fit a particular area of the page. As a consequence, the optimization goal is to find a layout that produces the least noticeable difference between font sizes, in order to obtain the most aesthetically pleasing layout. Finding the best areas for text requires knowledge of how typesetting engines actually render text for a particular setting. As such, we also model the behavior of the TeX typesetting engine when computing the height to be occupied by a text block as a function of the font size, text length and line width. An analytical approximation for text placement is then presented, refined by using curve fitting over TeX-generated data. As a practical result, the resulting layouts for a newspaper generation application are also presented. Finally, we discuss these results and directions for further research.