This is a program designed to generate all comic book layouts possible given a few assumptions:
- All panels are rectangular
- All panels can only have corners in predefined grid positions
- All available space on the page must be filled
I spend a lot of time thinking about how to do this, and I what I came up with is just brute force guessing. I was hoping to find how to predict the number of possible layouts given a known grid, but I haven't found the right way to express it. I even asked a mathemetician. So instead of running until that formula is satisfied, this script just runs forever. I just kill it whenever it seems like there aren't any more layouts for the current settings.
The file out.pl is currently set up for a nine-grid layout ( 3 by 3 ), so to use it for some other layout, change the $maxRow and $maxCol variables accordingly, and update the $allpoints, $rows and $columns strings to have the right number and sequences of characters.
The output will a string formatted as a list of positions and sizes. The other file, compile.pl, can read that format and generate pngs following those settings.