Content Flow Across Text Frames

[Gazook89]

Homebrewery would greatly benefit from having a mechanism to flow content between designated text frames across pages (or within pages). This is obvious and has been for a long time, but I don't believe we've ever had an issue open for it, please let me know if I've missed one. I think that we've just always felt like "it's not a web feature, it's never going to happen".

Getting flowing content would be huge.

• Using \page for only custom page breaks
• Changing document dimensions and not manually adjusting page breaks
• Inserting additional content or images without adjusting breaks

So here is a proper issue for it. Maybe here we can think about how to do it, what would be required for it or "nice to have" behaviors/extensions etc.

Edit in response to @5e-Cleric's response, putting it up front:

Its a huge pain to do something like this, as far as i know, that's why such a feature does not exist

It's still worth having the issue open, as we may incrementally come to some solution over time. Discussions about possibilities don't have to happen in gitter, run their course, and then effectively disappear, only to be discussed again a year later. Either some solution is found, or we have a good record of what has been proposed or tried.

[5e-Cleric]

Its a huge pain to do something like this, as far as i know, that's why such a feature does not exist. I am not even sure you can compute where the text is, since it can overflow its container.

[dbolack-ab]

Its a huge pain to do something like this, as far as i know, that's why such a feature does not exist. I am not even sure you can compute where the text is, since it can overflow its container.

No, it is doable. But it ain't fast.

This is largely the same work as the soft page breaks.

[Gazook89]

The library Pretext might be helpful here. It calculates text line dimensions without the DOM, so it doesn't have to do layout calculations. There is a pretty cool demo site here. And there may be additional uses for this library (better text wrapping around images?). I dunno, just some ideas. And the article I got this info from.

Active and current development. Author is a former React dev. No dependencies.

Edit 5/27: This breaks all of the text up into a span for every line and then positions it absolutely within it's parent container using top and left. For example, here is 3 very short lines of text:

So it would make the DOM a real pain the neck to deal with, possibly.

[Gazook89]

Just some thoughts on what might be required of any system like this:

• needs to work with different fonts and font sizes
• account for line-heights, margins, padding etc.
• the different text containers may be different sizes
• work across n number of text containers
• work on every keystroke (or maybe on each word break/space?)
• text can be added to the end of the content, or inserted earlier, or deleted
• be able to set the target next container, both as an automatic default (flow from page to page) or as a user-specified target (set a "next-container" attribute on the first container that points to where the text should flow to).
• what happens to things like tables: if at a page boundary, do they split, or does the whole table go to the next frame?
• What if a single element like a large heading doesn't fit in current container, nor in the next flow container, or the next? Is there a point where we prematurely fail the reflow?

Do CSS Columns complicate this or make it impossible? If so, can we replicate the current CSS Columns feature if we effectively solve all of the above or is this such a dealbreaker that it's not worth it?

Do all that performantly, over and over.

[Gazook89]

same work as the soft page breaks

Yeah, it's basically soft page breaks. I had forgotten about that, and I see it's closed. For reference, PR #4134. Do you think you ran into a single barrier, or multiple issues, or closed it because it just wasn't merged and was too much to keep current?

[Gazook89]

Just for fun, here are two podcast episodes in the last day or two that touch briefly (very briefly) on the library Pretext or css regions:

Pretext mentions in Syntax podcast. Mentioned a few times, but predominantly about rendering very large diffs (15,000 lines).

Paged media at the very end of ShopTalk show, soliciting topics for next episode. Basically "what are things the web Can't do?"