[Tex/LaTex] Automatic newspaper creation in LaTeX

automationnewspaperpositioning

This is a very general question about LaTeX, asked by a 100% newbie!

I'm trying to figure out if it's feasible to build an automatic newspaper creation engine, and if LaTeX can help in this field.

The goal is to be able to build something like:

http://issuu.com/fruitcake_worb/docs/web_fruitmix-0211

… based on a list of articles, each made up of text, images, and some meta-informations, like a "template" and maybe a few other high-level informations.

Does anyone have experience / examples in this field?

Best Answer

Yes, it is possible. But there are two problems here, the typesetting and the design issue.

Typesetting: Of course TeX handles typesetting very well. But you will run into things like shaped paragraphs. For these you need to calculate the shape of the image that will blend into the paragraph. Or if you have a rectangular graphic that is in the middle of two columns, you need to cut out this shape in two columns. This all gets really difficult in LaTeX.

Design: You can't fit a text into a grid easily. You need to take into account how long the text is. You have one or two images along with the text. Do you want them to be above the text, below? Which stories go on the first page? These questions require a lot of designing. And putting the design instructions into LaTeX code is not a fun task.

At my company we offer a TeX based software that solves problem #1, but #2 has do be done nevertheless.