1. General considerations

1.1 Placement problem

The field of shape placement remains wide open. The major difficulty lies in the current inability to find general characteristics for shapes, which forces users to adopt criteria that are often subjective and therefore restrictive. It therefore appears that the most important phases in the resolution of any shape placement problem are those of coding and representation.

• Shape coding

  Automatic placement of irregular shapes raises the important question of how to represent the objects to be placed. We present contour comb coding. Combs represent the rectangular deficiency of a shape. This deficiency is used to assemble the shapes that match best: we call this shape complementarity....