Rectangular Ganging Recommendation Engine
Current Rust-owned, bounded rectangular layout recommendation scope and its production limitations.
Rectangular Ganging Recommendation Engine
The current NowToPrint ganging foundation evaluates rectangular items derived from a single verified source against bounded sheet candidates. It returns a deterministic recommendation for operator review. It is not yet a production multi-customer-job composition service.
Canonical authority
ntp-pdf-imposition owns candidate evaluation, placement geometry, scores, work counters, and the
sealed recommendation identity. TypeScript and WASM surfaces may display or transport this result;
they do not create a second authoritative optimizer.
Current product boundary
Cross-document compatibility and composition are not implemented. The engine does not claim true-shape nesting, global optimality, automatic production marks, guillotine-cut compatibility, or production release. Existing multi-job TypeScript batching remains legacy preview and business workflow debt.
How the Current Engine Works
The canonical optimizer uses a deterministic, hard-capped rectangular shelf heuristic. It evaluates permitted orientations and sheet candidates with checked integer units, verifies the selected layout again, and compares sheet count, waste, cost, and duration evidence. The same input, policy, budget, and engine version produce the same digest-bound recommendation.
Evidence carried by a recommendation
- Source and item provenance, including all copy counts
- Candidate sheets, allowed rotations, grain semantics, objective order, and hard budgets
- Selected placements plus sheet, waste, cost, and duration metrics
- Deterministic engine work counters and an optimizer-version-bound digest
- Explicit limitations and
productionReleaseAllowed=false
These fields make a recommendation auditable. They do not prove that no better arrangement exists.
Safe Evaluation Workflow
Create or resolve one opaque verified input. Raw local paths, arbitrary URLs, and browser-generated geometry do not become canonical authority.
Provide allowed sheet dimensions, costs, durations, grain constraints, copy counts, and search budgets. Invalid, overflowing, or over-budget requests fail closed.
Compare the selected candidate and alternatives. Treat waste and cost as decision evidence, not as a global-optimum certificate.
A ganging recommendation is not an imposed PDF. Production output still requires a compatible multi-source authority, canonical composition, exact output receipt, post-imposition preflight, and release-policy approval.
What Is Not Yet Available
| Capability | Current status |
|---|---|
| Cross-document customer-job compatibility | Not implemented |
| Multi-source PDF composition | Not implemented |
| True-shape / contour nesting | Not implemented |
| Guaranteed globally optimal layout | Not claimed |
| Automatic crop, registration, or colour-bar authoring | Not implemented |
| Scanner-, cutter-, or RIP-certified production output | Not claimed |
Use the engine today as a bounded recommendation and digital-twin comparison foundation. Do not send its preview or recommendation directly to press.
Previous: ← Imposition | Next: Crop Marks →
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