On Thu, 27 Mar 2014 19:29:13 -0400 Peter Schaffter <pe...@schaffter.ca> wrote:
> Would it not make more sense to have groff, more or less as-is, > shoulder more of the burden of what we do manually, *using the same > strategies*, to achieve better *lines*, rather than focussing on > the whole paragraph? This is an excellent idea. Your key insight is that what you do by hand could be automated with very little impact on the overall system, to useful effect. I doubt it's been fully explore because the problem of "how to set a paragraph" is considered solved, by TeX. It occurs to me that an algorithm that aims only at a better line -- for some value of "better" -- is at a disadvantage versus the paragraph-at-once approach. In considering a line, a per-line algorithm cannot steal letters from the previous line, the one already set. The best it can do is pack more letters on the current line. That might be OK. It's what you do (IIUC) manually, because too much whitespace is the major bugaboo. It also might be improved by a lookahead rule: rather than looking strictly at the current line, consider the potential impact on the next one, and perhaps "donate" a character or two to the line yet to come. --jkl
