Rectangular Partitioning

Motivation The motivation for Rectangular Partitioning comes from my work. The application I help create has forms that can be designed by third parties, and it also has a layout engine that makes it easy to change the layout of a form based on the size of the form and its contents. The layout engine takes as it’s input a table of cells and their contents, along with attributes specifying how a given cell, row, or column should behave (i.e. expand when the form expands, alignment of controls, etc.). The table of cells may have controls that overlap multiple cells, but each cell may contain at most one control. Third party form designers don’t have direct access to this layout engine, and so we created a conversion from the form they designed to the layout engine input by subdividing the form space into rows and columns based on the placement of individual controls, which are all rectangular. Minimizing the number of rows plus columns is important to the running time of the layout engine, so that is our goal.