Branch deadline coming up

[Jeremias Maerki <de...@greenmail.ch>]

Thanks to Luca, lists are essentially dealt with. After an easy fix the
current test cases for lists all pass.

What remains of the crucial parts for the Knuth approach is the border
handling for tables. I don't think I can do that until Wednesday.
Tomorrow I have appointments almost all day and I'll be off-line during
Thursday and maybe Friday. We've now collected some experience with the
Knuth approach and I'd say although the remaining problem is quite
complicated I think we can make it work. That would mean we can merge
the Knuth branch back into CVS HEAD. But I'd like to hear your opinions,
too. There's still a slight chance of hitting a dead end with tables
which makes me a bit uneasy. So I'd rather extend the deadline for
about 10 days just to be sure.

Does anyone see any other possible issues with the branch that I may
have forgotten?


Jeremias Maerki

Re: Branch deadline coming up

[Jeremias Maerki <de...@greenmail.ch>]

On 19.04.2005 22:05:26 Simon Pepping wrote:
> Jeremias,
> 
> On Mon, Apr 18, 2005 at 05:08:36PM +0200, Jeremias Maerki wrote:
> > Thanks to Luca, lists are essentially dealt with. After an easy fix the
> > current test cases for lists all pass.
> > 
> > What remains of the crucial parts for the Knuth approach is the border
> > handling for tables. I don't think I can do that until Wednesday.
> > Tomorrow I have appointments almost all day and I'll be off-line during
> > Thursday and maybe Friday. We've now collected some experience with the
> > Knuth approach and I'd say although the remaining problem is quite
> > complicated I think we can make it work. That would mean we can merge
> > the Knuth branch back into CVS HEAD. But I'd like to hear your opinions,
> > too. There's still a slight chance of hitting a dead end with tables
> > which makes me a bit uneasy. So I'd rather extend the deadline for
> > about 10 days just to be sure.
> 
> I have not had the time to probe the new code to a great extent. What
> I see looks good.
> 
> I noticed that each line in a paragraph has the height of the first
> line of that paragraph. That is not correct, and may invalidate test
> files.

Thanks for the hint. We'll need to create a test case for that.

> I also noticed that the whole page sequence is read before pages are
> created. Is that going to change, as discussed some time ago?

I've given that some thought and put it off for now. There are a few
points to consider here:
- The generation of Knuth elements would have to be restartable at
arbitrary points.
- For changing available IPD we need a tracking mechanism that decides
that enough elements are generated to create content up to the page
after which the available IPD changes. This needs to be as optimal as
possible to avoid too many discarded created elements.
- Not handling the whole page-sequence at once kills the benefits for
optimal page breaking for book style documents. The algorithm is reduced
to a first/best fit. This is no problem for business documents however.

The points above are probably not trivial to handle.

> > Does anyone see any other possible issues with the branch that I may
> > have forgotten?
> 
> I am worried about performance. Knuth elements are passed up and down
> the LM tree, and at each step the Position is wrapped or
> unwrapped. That probably occurs very many times, and together these
> operations could require considerable processing time. Perhaps it can
> be avoided. I do not see a fundamental reason why the whole stack of
> ancestral LMs should be contained in a Knuth element.

Good point. With just a little additional flexibility in the addAreas()
methods we can probably get rid of the wrapping. A good thing would
certainly be a speed comparison between 0.20.5, current CVS HEAD and the
Knuth branch. I'll see if I can do a short investigation next week, just
to see if we're way off.

Jeremias Maerki

Re: Branch deadline coming up

[Jeremias Maerki <de...@greenmail.ch>]

Damn, cancel that. I see now what you mean. It's the boxes that are
wrong. A singled-sided test looks ok, so addAreas() actually paints
something else that the boxes imply. The element list is wrong. Looks
like it would be cool to be able to extract the element lists for unit
tests.

On 20.04.2005 14:28:08 Jeremias Maerki wrote:
> I've just tried to reproduce that (with an fo:inline specifying a bigger
> font size) and it came out fine. Would you mind writing a test case for
> that?
> 
> On 19.04.2005 22:05:26 Simon Pepping wrote:
> > I noticed that each line in a paragraph has the height of the first
> > line of that paragraph. That is not correct, and may invalidate test
> > files.
> 
> 
> Jeremias Maerki



Jeremias Maerki

Re: Branch deadline coming up

[Jeremias Maerki <de...@greenmail.ch>]

I've just tried to reproduce that (with an fo:inline specifying a bigger
font size) and it came out fine. Would you mind writing a test case for
that?

On 19.04.2005 22:05:26 Simon Pepping wrote:
> I noticed that each line in a paragraph has the height of the first
> line of that paragraph. That is not correct, and may invalidate test
> files.


Jeremias Maerki

Re: Branch deadline coming up

[Simon Pepping <sp...@leverkruid.nl>]

Jeremias,

On Mon, Apr 18, 2005 at 05:08:36PM +0200, Jeremias Maerki wrote:
> Thanks to Luca, lists are essentially dealt with. After an easy fix the
> current test cases for lists all pass.
> 
> What remains of the crucial parts for the Knuth approach is the border
> handling for tables. I don't think I can do that until Wednesday.
> Tomorrow I have appointments almost all day and I'll be off-line during
> Thursday and maybe Friday. We've now collected some experience with the
> Knuth approach and I'd say although the remaining problem is quite
> complicated I think we can make it work. That would mean we can merge
> the Knuth branch back into CVS HEAD. But I'd like to hear your opinions,
> too. There's still a slight chance of hitting a dead end with tables
> which makes me a bit uneasy. So I'd rather extend the deadline for
> about 10 days just to be sure.

I have not had the time to probe the new code to a great extent. What
I see looks good.

I noticed that each line in a paragraph has the height of the first
line of that paragraph. That is not correct, and may invalidate test
files.

I also noticed that the whole page sequence is read before pages are
created. Is that going to change, as discussed some time ago?

> Does anyone see any other possible issues with the branch that I may
> have forgotten?

I am worried about performance. Knuth elements are passed up and down
the LM tree, and at each step the Position is wrapped or
unwrapped. That probably occurs very many times, and together these
operations could require considerable processing time. Perhaps it can
be avoided. I do not see a fundamental reason why the whole stack of
ancestral LMs should be contained in a Knuth element.

Regards, Simon

-- 
Simon Pepping
home page: http://www.leverkruid.nl