Building a Map for Individual Pages

I spent a lot of time thinking about how to do this, it was clear that there needed to be some kind of pretty flexible language for writing the document and that millimeter-perfect accuracy was not something to aim for - it would increase the complexity too much which in turn would increase the time necessary to complete the archive.

So I started work looking at two pages from the Micro User. It quickly became apparent that the Bar Hill News just wasn't a good place it start, for a start it is A5 and therefore has significantly less complexity than a large magazine (or a newspaper). A model that can handle more complexity can always be used for less complex material, but a model designed for less complex material will fail when provided with material at the more complex end of the spectrum.

To the right is the first of the example pages.

The first thing to note is the page is split into five columns with a page header spanning across all five, and then containing three articles ("Compact boost for show", "Acorn's back in the black", and "Now MicroLink goes into Europe") with one article containing a photo. I would describe this as "medium complexity".

Now, dear reader, I have a choice. Do you want to hear about all the ways that didn't work or just the one way I ended up that did? Maybe a "things I tried and failed" could be a post for later. At this moment I think it's best to stick clearly to just what worked. 

First, the page (overall) gets a new property which itself has two new sub-properties; "box_size" with sub-properties "x" and "y". For this page the box size would be; x=5 (vertical divisions), y=20 (horizontal divisions). 

Now let's look at the content. 

The "News" header starts in box 0,0 and spans 5 boxes vertically, and 4 boxes horizontally. Next, the "Compact boost for show" article starts at 0,5 and does not span boxes vertically, but horizontally expands for the rest of the page.

Now things become a little more complicated; ordering matters. 

If the next box we do is for the "Acorn's back in the black"-article then this starts at 2,5 and fills the page both vertically and horizontally. Now is we place the "Now MicroLink goes into Europe" article at 3,14 and have it fill the page as well it overwrites some of the "Acorn's back in the black"-article space.

Finally, the image, a photograph, is at 5,9 and spans horizontally for 3. 

Here is a diagram with distinct colours lined up next to a scan of the actual page;

Now, we have constructed a map of the page showing exactly where each component goes. Of course, successfully building a map for a single page doesn't prove this will work for everything. Let's try a slightly different page.

As you can see from the map on the left, the same logic works well, but the order is key again.

I'm sure there will be issues, but it looks like this format is a good starting place.