Re: The ultimate (?) float problem

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

Piotr Kopszak wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> I am close to give up, but maybe there is a solution... I have a book
> to typeset literally peppered with hundreds of little drawings which
> are supposed to appear irregularly surrounded by text flowing around
> them on all sides.
> --------------------------------
> |xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx |
> |xxxxx-----xxxxxxxxxxxxxx|
> |xxxxx|     |xxxxxx----xxxx |
> |xxxxx|__|xxxxxx|     |xxxx|
> |xxxxxxxxxxxxxx |__|xxxx|
> |xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx|
> --------------------------------
> 
> I naively imagine that should not be that hard to implement ;) Since
> we already have overlays it's no problem to place images in arbitrary
> places. It only remains to drill white holes in the text to make room
> for them.  What about such procedure:
> 
> 1. While building the line TeX checks if there is any overlay ahead.
> 2 if so, it puts empty hbox of the overlay width when it reaches
> necessary distance from the edge.
> 3. and does so for the number of lines which equal overlay height.
> 
> Of course that  leaves aside the problem of justification and without
> justification such page would probably look very ugly (I dare not to
> think if hz optimization, which I really got used to, would still
> work).
> Is there still hope I could stay with ConTeXt this time as well?

one can have parshapes in tex but not that complex as you want

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                                           Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
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