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Message-ID:  <18263.4996.905115.46103@morse.mittelbach-online.de>
Date:         Wed, 5 Dec 2007 22:09:24 +0100
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
From: Frank Mittelbach <frank.mittelbach@LATEX-PROJECT.ORG>
Subject: progress ... balancing, grids, multicolumn changes ...
To: LATEX-L@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE
Precedence: list
Status: R

in case somebody is interested:

http://www.latex-project.org/svnroot/experimental/trunk/xpackages/xor/

now contains two pdfs

xo-pfloat.pdf           % my trial document and kind of documentation for the
                        % OR

xo-balance.pdf          % my trial document for balancing

balancing so far only works very crudely (e.g. grid typesetting breaks) but it
already shows some nice effects like balancing around a top or bottom figure
and more or less working with ftnright type of footnotes.

well ... if anybody has some good ideas what footnotes are suppose to do
within balanced text ... please tell me (options not dogmata :-)

right now I support column footnotes or ftnright but only within the balanced
text.

another possibility would be to handle them like multicol does, ie pagewide or
offpage, e.g. in the margin.

not clear at all is how to change columns (or whether or not to support
it). Multicol did this but at the cost of forbidding floats and this is really
where the restriction are. If the column structure changes then all float
placements have to be redone. in fact one would need a completely different
type of float page specification (e.g. when going from 2 to three columns in
the middle of the page).

maybe the answer is that this is simply not supported and the only support is
to have small parts falling back to single column in front of the balanced
material so that you can have headings running across but otherwise fix the
column structure except on page boundaries.

what do you think?

frank