8
points
sylvainhalle
Joined 4 karma
- Author here. This is a LuaLaTeX-based layout engine that computes page geometry in Lua and emits flowfram frames for deterministic, magazine-style layouts.
It’s intentionally not a newspaper-style balancer: columns don’t equalize automatically. The goal is predictable, designed layouts (sidebars, banners, figures spanning columns).
Happy to answer technical questions about LuaTeX, flowfram constraints, or the DSL.
Hyphenation and justification are a big part of why magazine production pipelines historically stayed in Quark/InDesign rather than TeX. Even with TeX’s excellent line-breaking algorithm, narrow justified columns will expose whitespace issues unless you tune hyphenation, tolerance, and sometimes switch to ragged-right for specific blocks.
In this example, the wide spacing you point out is mostly due to conservative hyphenation + full justification. It’s not something the layout engine enforces — the same frames can be rendered with different paragraph settings.
The “users - a” case is also a good catch. That’s indeed a source / micro-typography issue (ASCII dash with spaces instead of an em-dash), and TeX is doing exactly what it’s told. A real production workflow would normalize that early on.
One thing I’m exploring next is adding a baseline grid and better vertical rhythm control at the frame level, which should make it easier to mix justified and ragged blocks while keeping alignment consistent.
Your experience with Quark Tags is very much the kind of workflow gap this project is trying to narrow: not to replace DTP tools, but to make TeX-based pipelines more predictable and design-oriented.