Flexible Font-Size Specification in Web Documents
Kuang-Hsu R Lin, Kim Marriott, Peter J. Stuckey · 1999
Web document designers typically have access to many dozens of different fonts, carefully choosing the type face and font size to achieve a certain feel, while most browsers provide only a few browser-dependant fonts. A key challenge in document delivery over the Internet is therefore to choose fonts on the viewing machine which most closely reflect the desires of the designer yet meet the requirements of the viewer. Here we present a very general model for font-size selection, in which the designer and viewer may specify both required and desired constraints between the font-sizes. It is the browser's responsibility to find which locally available fonts best satisfy these possibly conicting desires. We show that, in general, this font-size selection problem is NP-hard. In practice, however, the constraints occurring in such problems usually contain no more than two variables and are acyclic. We give a polynomial time algorithm for this case. An empirical comparison shows ...