[reportlab-users] Platypus spacing issues

[Andy Robinson]

2008/5/10 Dinu Gherman <gherman at darwin.in-berlin.de>:

> Hi,

> 2. In the left column on page two you see un agly gap, because the

> following illustration did not fit there anymore. Is there some

> flowable magic that would detect this, grab the following flowable

> (in this case a paragraph) and split it such that the image is fit

> into the "middle" of the paragraph and the empty space disappears?

> Or is there any other way to do this?


No, there is not.  Currently we don't do any reordering.

>

> If I'm not mistaken LaTeX provides both features out of the box.


2 comments:  (a) we're not as clever as Donald Knuth and pals,
(b) Platypus does a dumb forward pass with no backtracking,
hence its speed (even in Python) and relative stupidity with
widows, orphans etc.

I have ideas for future (incompatible) versions but the API would
have to be a bit different.  If you have items A, B and C in the story
and you do not absolutely require B to occur between A and C,
it would need to be declared somehow.

- Andy