Automatic yellow-pages pagination and layout

Abstract

The compact and harmonious layout of ads and text is a fundamental and costly step in the production of commercial telephone directories (ldquoYellow Pagesrdquo). We formulate a canonical version of Yellow-Pages pagination and layout (YPPL) as an optimization problem in which the task is to position ads and text-stream segments on sequential pages so as to minimize total page length and maximize certain layout aesthetics, subject to constraints derived from page-format requirements and positional relations between ads and text. We present a heuristic-search approach to the YPPL problem. Our algorithm has been applied to a sample of real telephone-directory data, and produces solutions that are significantly shorter and better than the published ones.