Optimal pagination and content mapping for customized magazines

Traditional media such as magazines and newspapers are undergoing deep transformations as they cope with the high volume and dynamicity of currently available information. In addition, with the emergence of decentralized publishing models, there is an increasing need for automated tools for authoring high-quality documents. Moreover, much of the dynamic information on the Web could also profit from such mechanisms for automatic presentation and summarization. This paper describes a solution to the problem of automatically producing a camera-ready magazine from a set of page templates and a sequence of variable content to be placed on those templates. The algorithm is able to find the optimal number of pages to hold the content, selecting the best templates to be used in the magazine in such a way that all pages are optimally used. The algorithm was integrated to Adobe’s InDesign ® software, extending it to perform text fitting and rendering of magazine pages. The complete workflow is described in this paper, as well as an empirical evaluation and a discussion of future research directions.