Hi everybody, this summer I reimplemented some old ideas for an interface for placing boxes in a "natural way" and I also presented a draft of that work in SF this summer. Joseph did a cleaner reimplementation of that recently. This new implementation is working very nicely and it is available from the svn for people who want to play with it. We do think that the interface is now largely the way we like it. But I still think that there are a couple of things that would be worth having and I would be interested to hear what others think about this. Basically what xcoffins currently does is to provide a fairly natural way for specifying how boxes (called coffins for some reason) are to be aligned to each other including rotation and with Joseph's implementation also scaling. Having a descriptive interface that doesn't use some absolute coordinate system (such as the picture environment) but instead allows to specify alignments according to relations of objects is quite essential for providing layout specifications for things like headings, floats etc in a natural way. And as far as it goes I think it works quite well. But there are a couple of things which aren't provided that I guess one would like to have available when specifying layout for things like headings or floats. What I have in mind are primarily rules, specified not by giving absolute length but rather specifying the end points in relation to the coffin handles. A more or less natural extension of this would be something like "leaders" the way TeX defines them, or a variation of that. But perhaps that is already too much and rules are enough. I don't think that it is right to try to turn the concept of coffins into some sort of general purpose graphics language, ie. really complicated things are probably better done differently but it would be nice if the more common layouts could be easily decribed in this way and right now at least the rules seems to me something that is clearly necessary. But is there anything else you feel would be essential? And if so what? Also, what kind of paramerization would be suitable for such objects (again thinking about what is commonly needed and not so much what would be theoretically possible in some arcane setup)? any thoughts? frank