You might see Geometric Optimisation and Perl for a similar problem (though stated more generically than yours). And I want to say this is a kind of "knapsack problem" if you want to do more googling, but I vaguely remember doing that before and getting corrected that it's more of a "fooblesquznitz problem" (FSVO fooblesquznitz which I can't remember at the moment).

In reply to Re: Algorithm to fit photos into spaces on pages by Fletch
in thread Algorithm to fit photos into spaces on pages by SmugX

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