Re: column balancing question

[Michal Kvasnicka <quasar@econ.muni.cz>]

Good evening.

Many thanks for your help. Your solution works well with the newest 
ConTeXt and one particular document I now typeset. I have to check it 
still with more documents. Do you want to gen a report from these tests?

If you want I can send you many examples, but not `minimal files', since 
I don't know when the problem occures. As I typeset our church bulletin, 
I've got that result pretty often---approximately on one third or one 
fourth of all pages.

I can't switch to columnset all my documents. Columnsets are absolutely 
great (one of the ConTeXt miracle---I thought it is not possible to do 
it in TeX because of its breaking routines), but up-to-now columnsets 
cannot be ballanced (or can they?), and my church bulletin is typset in 
such a way that each article can start anywhere on the page, and the 
columns must be ballanced before it. I can't explain it better because 
of my English, but its pages look like this:

    xxxxx   xxxxx
    xxxxx   xxxxx
    xxxxx   xxxxx
    xxxxx   xxxxx

    Title of article
    xxxxx   xxxxx
    xxxxx   xxxxx

Therefore I would lobby for the support of the old \startcolumns ... 
\stopcolumns environment. :-)

As for the Willi Egger's question, I don't use `fit' options very often. 
The problem I've mentioned in my last mail occures even when the `width' 
is set to some dimen and the `length' of page is set to some number of 
lines.

Many greetings and thanks again.
Your sincerely
Michal Kvasnicka

> Hard to see without example. You may try this (i have this in my local 
> expermental setup)
> \def\getmulticolumnlines
>  {\mcscratchdimen-\columntextoffset
>   \multiply\mcscratchdimen \plustwo
>   \advance\mcscratchdimen \columntextheight
>   \ifdim\precolumnboxheight>\zeropoint
>      \advance\mcscratchdimen -\precolumnboxheight
>   \fi
>   \settotalinsertionheight
>   \advance\mcscratchdimen -\totalinsertionheight
>   \getnoflines\mcscratchdimen
>   % added 30/7/2004
>   \ifnum\layoutlines>\zerocount \ifnum\noflines>\layoutlines
>     \noflines\layoutlines
>   \fi \fi
>   \nofcolumnlines\noflines}
>
> Another option is to switch to column sets (see columns.pdf),
> Hans
>
>
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