When writing a report, have you ever changed the size of the images to fit everything on the same page? Or tried rewording one sentence to cram it all on 1 page rather than 1.06 pages?
That's one of the final jobs of a Math Newspaper editor! They try to figure out how to assemble 50 user-submitted articles onto one pretty PDF.
It's a complex task because editors often wrangle with:
- Placing image captions on the same page as the image/article
- Preventing articles from being split across different pages
Since it's so hard, the editors save time by:
- Inserting short jokes to fill up the remaining space on the column
- Leaving the whitespace in ¯\(ツ)/¯
It'd be cool if there were a program that could help the editors format these articles. Since the optimal layout probably takes O(2ⁿ) time to find, an approximate solution would be good enough. We could find a suitable design by throwing five greedy algorithms on the problem and picking the layout that violates the fewest constraints.
Of course, the computer doesn't need to optimize for the most compact layout. It could also optimize for "human editability" so editors could alter the configuration afterwards.
It'd be nice if we built this, and I think academic journals, newspaper articles, and brochures would also find it helpful. I hope you're feeling healthy this week and have a breathtaking day!
- Curtis
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