[texhax] Magazine layout

[William F. Adams]

On Saturday, July 10, 2004, at 10:09  AM, Michael Barr wrote:

> I think they basically used a preprocessor to generate
> \parshape specifications that were then used to lay out the material.  
> One
> of the problems was that sometimes text had to flow around a photo.  I
> came away with the impression that TeX was not a good tool for this 
> sort
> of publication.  Although I would not hesitate to use it for a simple
> newsletter that didn't use fancy formatting.

FWIW, I posted a technique I was working on for this sort of thing a 
while back to comp.text.tex.

Essentially one lays the job out in a graphical app (I was using Altsys 
Virtuoso), and the text had to be anchored in a corner, then one flowed 
in an endless series of ``x''s and spaces, made a .pdf which marked 
page breaks with a distinct text tag, then one converted the .pdf into 
a plain text file w/ just the ``x x x ...'', and looked at each page's 
worth of data, noting which corner it was anchored in. One then 
calculated a \parshape for it, and made use of that in tex --- it was 
the automatic calculation of that where I got bogged down, did it by 
hand once or twice, but my programming skills weren't up to it.

William

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William Adams, publishing specialist
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