From: "Zachary P. Landau" <kapheine@...>
Date: 2004-03-18T17:11:04+09:00
Subject: Re: Thinking about a window-packing algorithm...

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> I'm packing child windows into a larger window (MDI fashion).
> Imagine a bulletin board covered by a bunch of overlapping items.
>=20
> I want to find a "reasonable" way to position the smaller windows.
>=20
> Ideally part of each one would be exposed. For real-world values,
> that would be impossible, since the total area of the small windows
> would far exceed the total area of the large one.

Are you familiar with sawfish? It has a 'best-fit' window placement mode
similar to what you describe. It is written in rep, a lisp dialect, but
hopefully it will be easy enough for you to follow. I put the applicable
file at http://kapheine.hypa.net/tmp/smart.jl. If you snag the sawfish
distribution (http://sawfish.sourceforge.net) there are a couple other
placement modes in lisp/sawfish/wm/placement/: off-center, stagger, and
top-left. But I think smart is what you want.

--
Zachary P. Landau <kapheine@hypa.net>
GPG: gpg --recv-key 0x24E5AD99 | http://kapheine.hypa.net/kapheine.asc

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