FITTING A TABLE TO A PAGE USING NONLINEAR OPTIMIZATION

Nicholas Beaumont ()
Additional contact information
Nicholas Beaumont: Department of Management, Monash University, PO Box 197, Caulfield East, Victoria 3145, Australia

Asia-Pacific Journal of Operational Research (APJOR), 2004, vol. 21, issue 02, 259-270

Abstract: It is sometimes difficult to fit a large table comprising several rows and columns onto a page. The usual tactic is to manually adjust column widths, abbreviate some text, and/or change some cells' font sizes until the table fits onto a page. We show that it is possible to express the problem of adjusting column widths so as to minimize the height of a table as an optimization problem with nonlinear constraints. Five test problems were routinely solved using a free software package. We stress that the solutions are approximate because the model imperfectly simulates how many lines of a cell of a table will be required to contain a segment of text, but they appear to provide good approximations in difficult cases. The scant literature is summarized; the formulation and solution techniques outlined; examples are described; and differences between theoretical and actual answers explained. It would be possible to incorporate the calculations in word processing and typesetting packages such as Word and TeX.

Keywords: Nonlinear optimization; typesetting; word processing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0217595904000230
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:apjorx:v:21:y:2004:i:02:n:s0217595904000230

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S0217595904000230

Access Statistics for this article

Asia-Pacific Journal of Operational Research (APJOR) is currently edited by Gongyun Zhao

More articles in Asia-Pacific Journal of Operational Research (APJOR) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().