A Stack Laid out by Hand, One Box at a Time

The report of the example next door lays itself out: the engine chooses where each page breaks. Sometimes the boxes are yours to choose instead — a column beside a picture, a panel on a form, the room left under a letterhead — and the text has to go into them one after another.

Here a delivery slip is poured into a first box too short for it. The box says where it stopped, and the second box takes up from exactly there, so nothing is written twice and nothing is lost. A poster whose picture is taller than any box is refused outright rather than cut in half. Under each box a line gives the height taken and where it starts and ends: figures a program can check before it goes on.

What This Example Shows

A stack poured into boxes you choose, one at a time.
Each box says where the stack stopped, and the next resumes there.
A block taller than its box refused, never cut.

The Source Code, Complete

Nothing is left out and nothing is simplified: this is the program exactly as it runs, for the developer who uses this library.

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The Document Itself

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Examples Near This One

Breaking a Paragraph up, and Aligning It

A paragraph broken into lines, then laid out four ways: left, right, centred, justified.

Breaking an Overlong Word

A word longer than the column that holds it: the library leaves it whole, cuts it at the column's edge, or cuts it and closes the line on a hyphen.

Soft Hyphens and No-Break Spaces

A justified column set twice: the long words breaking at their soft hyphens with a hyphen shown, or left whole, and a figure a no-break space keeps together.

Break Points After a Slash or a Hyphen

A justified column set four times: file paths and compounds running past the edge with no break points, wrapping where a break after a slash or a hyphen is allowed, then wherever their punctuation allows one, and last with no-break hyphens that keep each compound whole.

A Report That Lays Itself Out

A title, a rule, two paragraphs, a heading, a table of twenty-six rows and a footnote, handed over in reading order and broken across two pages by the engine.

A Font behind the Font

One line of statuses set twice: in a company font alone, where the characters it has no glyph for come out as empty boxes, then with a second font behind it that draws them.

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