The ultimate (?) float problem

[Piotr Kopszak <kopszak@gmail.com>]

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?

Many thanks for any ideas in advance

Piotr
--
http://okle.pl
___________________________________________________________________________________
If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!

maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
webpage  : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net
archive  : https://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/
wiki     : http://contextgarden.net
___________________________________________________________________________________