Hi Doug, > 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.
I could be going over old ground here, and my brush with TeX was slight, but Tex has \parshape that's given N pairs of indent and line length to describe the first N rendered lines. I'd guess TeX users that wanted to specify a function, e.g. of the line number, would write TeX that calculated those values and then did the \parshape. (Some use MetaPost to do the sums.) http://www.ctan.org/pkg/shapepar, switching the name around, is a macro package that can handle holes, e.g. the eyes in a skull, but still boils down to taking a description of the scan lines to be filled for the shape. Cheers, Ralph.
