Today was a research sort of day. Did some capturing of security resources/code that I didn’t properly record/document when I was doing coding a few months back. Also, did some searching for outputting/reflowing to multiple columns.
Since CSS3 Multi-column layout is far far away, I had to look elsewhere. IHT’s implementation popped into mind as an option, probably the most viable one. John Weir has this code available for download at smokinggun: sg_layout. What’s interesting is that it replicates the full data for each column div and then replicates and calculates offsets. It seems weird at first, but I suppose this is probably the best way to do it considering what a pain in the ass it’d be to juggle in and out text in nodes. (Noticed that he has some nice bookmarklets too)
Hey, it’s too bad multicol never caught on, huh? I’m sort of surprised how little code there is out there that can emulate that functionality. You can also sort of emulate it server-side, but since so much of it can be based on font/final rendering geometry, it can be really hard to do exactly (you can do an approximate pretty easily based on line #s of chars I suppose). Of course it doesn’t really reflow or have real flexibility, but well, them are the breaks I suppose.
- PHP/PDF multi-column layout example code
- HTML_ToPDF 2.0