Dear forum,
I am attempting to write a script for a company that prints hoodies for school leavers. Currently, they just paste the list of names into the number box and then adjust the text manually moving things around, adjusting font size, line spacing, kerning, manually adding in spaces or line breaks until it looks ok, but it is quite difficult and time-consuming, and annoying!
The trickiest part is filling an irregular shape (a text frame) with names.
At the moment, they can be in three variants:
- First name only
- First name and initial
- First name and surname
In fact, I think, there will be needed two algorithms: one for 1 and 2 and another for 3.
The requirements are just to fit the children’s names in the outline of the “23” (for this year) and look neat and correct. All names need to be the same size as each other (no names bigger than others). Initial/surname would need to not be split from the first name by a line break. The shape should be filled with 1 or 2 times the name of each child (1 or 2 times depending on if we need to fill up more space when there aren’t many children, for instance).
The text frame is converted from text with the ‘create outlines’ command and adjusted manually. Now they want “23”, “24”, but in the future, they might need any word, like “Ski Trip” or “PE”.
My customers have looked on InDesign forums and other design forums and googled everything but they couldn’t find any software that will do this automatically for them with good results, or a way to easily do this in InDesign.
They could find wordcloud type software but often that makes lots of repetition and also makes some words bigger than others, which they don’t want as they don’t want one child to appear more ‘important’ than others, they all need to be the same size.
I am experimenting with this trying to find the right approach. Here on my site, I’m writing my thoughts aloud posting code snippets. (They’re constantly changing so I want to update them on the fly).
I’ve got a feeling that I’m reinventing the wheel and similar algorithms have been already developed, so any pointers would be greatly appreciated. I googled for this info, but couldn’t find what I need.
1 Correct answer
Hi Kasyan,
Very interesting problem! That's not a pure one-dimensional bin-packing algorithm because you want to distribute the items so that they use as many lines as possible (so we don't expect an optimal packing).
I found a simple and fast approach that may help you get closer to a solution. Here is a proof of concept:
1. BEFORE RUNNING THE SCRIPT
2. AFTER
If a solution is found, the result is almost instant (say 500 ms). My code has some tricks for speeding up width calculations of both t
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Replies
Hi Kasyan,
Very interesting problem! That's not a pure one-dimensional bin-packing algorithm because you want to distribute the items so that they use as many lines as possible (so we don't expect an optimal packing).
I found a simple and fast approach that may help you get closer to a solution. Here is a proof of concept:
1. BEFORE RUNNING THE SCRIPT
2. AFTER
If a solution is found, the result is almost instant (say 500 ms). My code has some tricks for speeding up width calculations of both the destination lines and the source items. Using centered-aligned dots (without line breaks) in the destination area allows us to calculate line widths with accuracy, and we can detect splitted-line cases and manage them.
But the important part is outside the InDesign DOM, that's the packing algo 🙂 The idea is very simple:
• Sort widths in source lines and destination bins.
• Pack as many lines as possible in the bins (from largest to lowest values).
• Update the capacities of the bins and resort.
• Loop until all source lines are placed.
(I have a JSX to share but didn't find your email address in my contacts [!], let me know where I could send you the script).
Best,
Marc
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