• sylvainhalle 2 days ago

    Author here. This is a LuaLaTeX-based layout engine that computes page geometry in Lua and emits flowfram frames for deterministic, magazine-style layouts.

    It’s intentionally not a newspaper-style balancer: columns don’t equalize automatically. The goal is predictable, designed layouts (sidebars, banners, figures spanning columns).

    Happy to answer technical questions about LuaTeX, flowfram constraints, or the DSL.

    • ofrzeta an hour ago

      No specific technical questions here, just some random remarks. When I worked at a printed magazine focused on Linux there was always the dream of creating a full production pipeline based on LaTeX but we never made it. The best we had was a text based markup format that in the end produced some markup with "Quark Tags" that could be imported in Quark or later Indesign. We also did some sponsoring of Scribus but never got to use it (trained graphics designers use Quark or Indesign, right).

      I did some tests with Scribus but got to the conclusion that a huge part of the layout result is the hyphenation. There's that famous technical paper by Frank Liang about hyphenation in TeX called "Word Hy-phen-a-tion by Com-put-er".

      Overall I think your layout looks great as a magazine layout. But for instance if you look at the third paragraph in the second page (starting with "The company hoped...") there's a bit too much white space between the words, I think. Also at the end of first paragraph (ending in "by end users - a first for the chip): it's pulling together "users" and "a" while it should be separated by an em-dash - but the problem could also be in the source - anyway there's not need to stuff that line with whitespace as it should be ragged left).