Relative placement directives

[Clint Olsen]

This has probably been discussed before:

I was discussing the philsophical idea of typesetting with a friend who has
used troff/TeX and friends, and one thing he mentioned that should be part
of a system would be 'relative' constraints.  In other words, placement
directives that are pagesize agnostic (like HTML).  This is a pretty handy
feature of web pages.  You resize the window, and it automagically
reformats the page.

Individual lines in paragraphs are handled pretty seamlessly in TeX and
Lout.  However, page margins are not.  What you'd like to dictate is a
relative balance of white space and text:

            -------------------
           |  ...............  |
           |  ...............  |
           |  ...............  |
           |  ...............  |
           |           ......  |
           |  -------  ......  |
           | |       | ......  |
           | |       | ......  |
           | |       | ......  |
           | |       | ......  |
           |  -------  ......  |
           |  ...............  |
            -------------------

I want a top margin that's X percent of the total page height.  I want a
bottom margin that's Y percent.  Likewise for left and right margins and
placement of graphics or other things.

If this is already possible somehow, then great.  I'm curious to know what
others think of this scenario.

Thanks,

-Clint