Optimal automatic table layout

Abstract

Automatic layout of tables is useful in word processing applications and is required in on-line applications because of the need to tailor the layout to the viewport width, choice of font and dynamic content. However, if the table contains text, minimizing the height of the table for a fixed maximum width is a difficult combinatorial optimization problem. We present three different approaches to finding the minimum height layout based on standard approaches for combinatorial optimization. All are guaranteed to find the optimal solution. The first is an A*-based approach that uses an admissible heuristic based on the area of the cell content. The second and third are constraint programming (C..