To­day I start­ed a branch called Smart­Frames. The main goal is to achieve a bet­ter text flow in the doc­u­ment (for ex­am­ple, for side­bars), and it is start­ing to get there, slow­ly.

Let's con­sid­er how ReST side­bars are ren­dered in the dif­fer­ent writ­er­s.

We'll work with an or­di­nary lorem ip­sum that has a side­bar de­clared just be­fore it.

Here's HTM­L:

And here's La­TeX:

Each one has its good side and its bad side.

The HTML side­bar is a re­al side­bar, while the La­Tex one is some sort of in­sert.

OTO­H, the ragged text against the HTML side­bar is ... hor­rid.

So, I want­ed some­thing at least a bit bet­ter than that for rst2pdf. In the best of all pos­si­ble world­s, it would be the neat text align­ment of La­Tex with the float­ing HTML side­bar.

Here's how it looks now:

There are some mi­nor prob­lems with the cur­rent im­ple­men­ta­tion, such that the side­bar is al­ways aligned to the top of a para­graph, and some spac­ing is­sues.

How is it done? Let me tell you: it was not triv­ial :-)

In fact it's pret­ty evil, but here's a quick ex­pla­na­tion:

When I get a side­bar flow­able, I in­sert a new frame in the page tem­plate where the side­bar should go, then call a frame­break, in­sert the "re­al" side­bar, a "frame­cut­ter" and an­oth­er frame­break.

The frame­cut­ter is a flow­able that does noth­ing vis­i­ble, but in­serts an­oth­er two frames, one at the right of the side­bar with the same height, and an­oth­er be­low the side­bar, full width.

I need to use the frame­cut­ter be­cause I don't know the height of the side­bar un­til af­ter it's drawn.

So, we now have 4 frames in­stead of one:

1. The orig­i­­nal frame, cov­­ers the whole page, but has a frame­break above the side­bar.

2. The side­bar frame, which is very tal­l, but has a frame­break be­low the side­bar tex­t.

3. A beside-the-side­bar frame, short and wide, start­ing at the right of the side­bar.

4. A be­low-the-side­bar frame, wide and tal­l, start­ing be­low the side­bar.

The text should flow from 1 to 3 to 4 neat­ly and the seams should­n't show.

Here's a pic­ture that MAY make it clear (there are some odd dis­place­ments: those were bugs):

So, I'm not call­ing it a suc­cess yet, but it is look­ing de­cen­t.