Optimization of web newspaper layout in real time

The web newspaper pagination problem consists in optimizing the layout of a set of articles extracted from several web newspapers and sending it to the user as the result of a previous query. This layout should be as similar as possible to that of real newspapers and should be adapted to the user's web browser con®guration in real time. Previous approaches to the problem took rather a long time or su€ered the constraint of all the articles having the same width. This paper presents an improved approach based on simulated annealing (SA) that solves the problem online, adapts itself to the client's computer con®guration and also supports articles with di€erent widths, so that long articles can now be laid out in more than one column, producing a squarer shape. With this new feature, the layouts obtained look more like a real newspaper, where important or long articles occupy more than one column.