alt Hacker News> "I’ve been there, implementing a way to linearise text from a document with pages with 1, 2 or 3 columns, some of them in landscape is a nightmare."
I thought it's actually a fun problem! Some of the naive solutions (based on alternating horizontal/vertical recursion) are quite elegant and cool.
It was fun!
What was not so fun was to make it work reliably. I ended up with piles of ugly code to handle edge cases, and issues kept piling up. So in the end I was happy to use someone else’s solution.