Optimal guillotine layout

Abstract

Guillotine-based page layout is a method for document layout commonly used by newspapers and magazines, where each region of the page either contains a single article, or is recursively split either vertically or horizontally. Suprisingly there appears to be little research into algorithms for automatic guillotine-based document layout. In this paper we give efficient algorithms to find optimal solutions to guillotine layout problems of two forms. Fixed-cut layout is where the structure of the guillotining is given and we only have to determine the best configuration for each individual article to give the optimal total configuration. Free layout is where we also have to search for the optimal structure. We give bottom-up and top-down dynamic programming algorithms to solve these problems, and propose a novel interaction model for documents on electronic media. Experiments show that our algorithms are effective for realistic layout problems.