[texhax] The fundamental problem ...

[Uwe Lueck]

"Peter Davis" <pfd at pfdstudio.com>
> On Sun, Jun 26, 2011 at 3:11 AM, Uwe Lueck <uwe.lueck at web.de[mailto:uwe.lueck at web.de]> wrote:
>> "Peter Davis" <pfd at pfdstudio.com[mailto:pfd at pfdstudio.com]> wrote 26.06.2011 05[#]:29:19:
>>> On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 8:45 PM,> Donald Arseneau <asnd at triumf.ca[mailto:asnd at triumf.ca][mailto:asnd at triumf.ca[mailto:asnd at triumf.ca]]> wrote:
>>>> Peter Davis <pfd at pfdstudio.com[mailto:pfd at pfdstudio.com][mailto:pfd at pfdstudio.com[mailto:pfd at pfdstudio.com]]> writes:
>>>>> The flowfram package comes pretty close to what I need, but it still has two
>>>>> limitations that would be difficult to work around:
>>>>> 1) if it overflows a frame in the middle of a paragraph, and the following
>>>>> frame has a different width, the end of that paragraph will be set at the
>>>>> width of the first frame, not the second.
>>>> You'll have to keep travk of line-counts and usr \parshape.
>>> Thanks, Donald, but I don't see how \parshape let's me know
>>> how much of the text fit on a line (or set of lines).
>>> I can work out that the height of a box divided by
>>> the baselineskip tells me how many lines will fit, but how can I
>>> determine what text has to overflow into the next box?
>> Trying to solve the cryptical hint:
>> 1. Assume all lines have same height -- grid typesetting,

> Uwe, I've read over your suggestions a few times. 
> I think I see roughly how this would work, but I'll have to learn some more
> about TeX processing to understand it better.  In particular, I would need
> to split paragraphs across multiple frames, potentially with different widths. 
> I understand how \parshape can do typesetting across different line widths,
> but I don't understand how to put those lines on different parts of the page.

I thought you are happy with the way flowfram.sty distributes the content
(one flow) into frames. However, I only had some glances at ffuserguide.pdf.
It seems to me that it allows frames of different widths for the same flow.

Then, however, the package also should handle the different paragraph shapes,
no need to guess here about \parshape. From the introductory words for
"dynamic frames" I guess that rather typesetting is repeated
when a paragraph spans frames, not clear to me exactly.
Maybe as an alternative to my proposal, the package tries to get ready
with as few line width changes as possible, starting with a normal
shape without width changes, and adding more line specifications
to the \parshape command when the number of lines in the previous
specification is less than the paragraph actually needs.

Otherwise, my approach would be to implement frames
by a "dynamic" output routine that changes \textheight etc.
after each run and stores the frames somewhere
until a phyisical page is completed, generalizing LaTeX's
two-column mode.

Did you actually try flowfram.sty?

Curious:

    Uwe.