> Is there a shaping method which provides optimal spacing whilst using traps?
In priniciple, yes, but I haven't heard a better way of doing it than the multiprocess dynamic program that I once outlined on this mailing list; everyone guesses this would be too costly to run. This is a real challenge for anyone who wants to introduce Knuthian line-breaking into troff. But my actual question about figurate text was how in Tex (as distinct from the Knuth line-breaking paper) would one specify the shape of a non-rectangular paragraph, in which line length varies as some function of vertical position. Doug McIlroy
