World: r3wp

however, there is a race condition with cut. so i'm going to always 
do split.

What's the purpose of split ?

Also, cut and split - it's difficult to distinguish the difference. 
Need better words.

Really ? So it's easier to do split ?

cut would not cut it at a random place. the difference is borders 
and margins (and padding)

So - split is your preferred method over cut, but what about the 
option to move the entire row to the next page if it doesn't quite 
fit on this one ?

that is a matter of how big it is the row.

if it's half a page it's probably much better to split it in two

How to control all these variables !!! It's a big job, isn't it ?

notice that tables can be used for many things, for example to layout 
a numbered list, with the number in the first cell and the text in 
the second

yes it is. :)

the total fit algorithm can do most of this. the problem are the 
"minor" details like vertical alignment.

basically i must find all possible breakpoints in each row. the problem 
is what to do with vertical alignment: if you have a cell that should 
be aligned in the middle, and there's a bigger cell that gets split, 
how does the smaller one get aligned?

As soon as you said that, I thought of a default threshold cell size 
which decides between splitting and moving to next page. And then 
this can be overridden by the user, who can move the threshold between 
0% and 100%,  0% indicating always split, and 100% indicating always 
move.

That's not a nice problem. :-(  I think if the user has some control 
of the variables (eg. maybe threshold), then they can influence what 
happens there.

Perhaps certain cells can be set to "never split" ?

(or certain rows)

that is possible using penalties.

I think that might be the simple answer, actually. It is only when 
the software makes a blunder with intelligent splitting that it becomes 
a problem. If the user can force a row to always remain together 
that would solve most of those problems.

a paragraph of two lines already has a big penalty for being split. 
so generally it is kept together.

basically you're saying: either you allow vertical alignment, or 
cell splitting.

which is one possible solution.

(Ok, so the algorithm looks for the lowest penalties first.)

the algorithm produces the layout with the least total demerits.

Yes, I think it will be the easiest and simplest solution.

(in some cases it doesn't, because it would require too much time, 
but the user decides this, by setting the tolerance)

(That's not to say people won't be looking for more complex interactions, 
but I think the simplest way solves most complaints the quickest.)

ok, i will think more about the problem (still hope to find some 
kind of nice solution), and see what others think too.

Cool, good luck.

What do the current LaTeX to DPF programs do?

Reichart, I'm still learning about TeX, but I'll guess, LaTeX to 
PDF take output from LaTeX (a TeX document) and convert it to the 
PDF format. To see output from LaTeX, you still need a TeX engine 
to view the document in the final form. Convert it to PDF, and you 
just need a PDF viewer.

About tables? TeX only handles very simple tables. Absolutely not 
enough to get QML tables there.

(you can do almost everything with TeX by using tricks, but you basically 
need to layout the table manually. it is not able to do that automatically 
- something that we need to do instead.)

That was what I figured.

update: added preliminary table support.

(the table dialect is still very basic, just for testing. table layout 
seems to work well, uses the total-fit algorithm and should create 
optimal layouts in most usual cases. there are boundary cases where 
it can fail, but i hope we won't need to worry about them. check 
test.pdf for an example of a table.)

Somehow I lost the link to the PDF-Maker test site. Would someone 
please post it.

For whatever it is worth, Gabriele, I use PDF-Maker regularly. It 
is core to some of my most important scripts. So, I very much appreciate 
your work.

Louis, what is your input lanaguge for PDFMaker?

Currently only English.  But I'm needing to print Greek, Indonesian, 
and English mixed on the same page. Also, Hebrew, Indonesian, English 
on the same page. To be more specific,  a line of Greek, then a line 
of Indonesian, then a line of English, then back to a line of Greek, 
and so on.

http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/PDFM2

update: added embedded tables (i.e. tables between paragraphs)

this also means that you can have a table inside a table cell - not 
tested yet, but maybe it works. ;)

I like the cautious optimism :)    Looking good.

LOL, I meant as in HTML, MakeDoc, etc.

reichart, i'm pretty sure he's using the pdf maker dialect directly.

Ah.  What is it?  I have not played with PDF Maker

it's much lower level than MD or QML. It's a REBOL dialect, not a 
ML.

update: text colors, fixed table parsing bug

i have tested table inside table cell, it works fine. (see test.pdf)

Cool. Getting better.