Article ID: | iaor20003062 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 2 |
Issue: | 4 |
Start Page Number: | 321 |
End Page Number: | 342 |
Publication Date: | Oct 1996 |
Journal: | Journal of Heuristics |
Authors: | Shieber Stuart, Johari Ramesh, Marks Joe, Partovi Ali |
Keywords: | printing, layout |
The compact and harmonious layout of ads and text is a fundamental and costly step in the production of commerical telephone directories (‘Yellow Pages’). We formulate a canonical version of Yellow-Pages pagination and layout (YPPL) as an optimization problem in which the task is to position ads and text-stream segments on sequential pages so as to minimize total page length and maximize certain layout aesthetics, subject to constraints derived from page-format requirements and positional relations between ads and text. We present a heuristic-search approach to the YPPL problem. Our algorithm has been applied to a sample of real telephone-directory data, and produces solutions that are significantly shorter and better than the published ones.