HexaPDF 0.8.0 - Box Layout Published on Friday, 26 October 2018

The last release, 0.7.0, was done to fix some issues and didn’t include any of the major changes since 0.6.0. With the 0.8.0 release these major changes are now incorporated into HexaPDF and lay the groundwork for document layouting.

So what is new for HexaPDF?

The 0.6.0 release enhanced the base box layout class with many more styling properties but it still wasn’t possible to easily position such boxes. So naturally the next step was to design how they would be layed out on a page.

In HexaPDF layout boxes represent all things that should be put on a page, be it text (like headings and paragraphs), images or other content. Typically (at least with western languages), the boxes are layed out from top to bottom and left to right. So the easiest thing would be to define a “cursor” position that represents the vertical position to place the current box and after placing it, move the cursor downwards.

However, with such a model you cannot easily do things like having a picture and flowing text around it. Or putting a box into the middle of the page and then flowing the boxes around this hole. Or having non-rectangular regions to put boxes in.

Therefore I decided to do things differently:

To layout boxes HexaPDF uses frames where a frame is a set of rectilinear polygons (i.e. only consisting of vertical and horizontal lines).

When a box gets placed in a frame, the occupied region is subtracted from the frame’s polygons, resulting in new polygons for the frame.

Each frame knows how to find the position where the next box should be placed (the top-most, left-most point) and how big the available rectangular region at that position is.

If a box doesn’t fit, the frame also knows how to calculate the next possible position and region.

Doing things in this way seems very complicated at first but it certainly makes some things very easy:

A frame can have any form and can contain holes. This is the reason a frame can potentially consist of multiple polygons.

Boxes can be styled using the new position and position_hint style properties to remove the whole vertical stripe in which they are in, imitating the basic cursor model.

And these style properties can also make a box “float” to the left or right, like blocks in HTML, removing only their occupied region.

I also hope that this design will make future additions straightforward (like, for example, multi column layout).

To make working with the frame’s polygons easier, I created a new rubygem called geom2d. There were some Ruby libraries available that define basic 2D geometric objects and some algorithms but none really fit the needs. The goal of geom2d was to provide a polygon class and an algorithm for intersecting two polygons. To this end I read several papers on boolean operations on polygons and then implemented one of them.

The HexaPDF::Layout::TextLayouter class has been enhanced as well to allow placing text in an arbitrary polygon. This is needed because otherwise placing text in a frame and flowing it according to the frame’s polygon wouldn’t be possible.

So, now that I have bored you with the technical details, have a look at the new examples to see how this can be put to good use:

The automatic box placement example shows how to use a frame to place multiple boxes.

The text flow example shows how text is automatically flown around floating boxes.

Mind you that doing things like this is still not really “high level” since there are some essential things missing, like splitting a box if it doesn’t fit (think of text at the bottom of a page), not to mention high level constructs like tables.

The next step is to provide a class that abstracts the composition aspects so that one can say: Here are N styled boxes, here are the definitions of the frames that should be used (e.g. a special frame definition for the first page and a common definition for all other pages), lay out the boxes while creating pages as needed.

As always, have a look at the changelog for an overview of all changes.