On Sunday, 7 May 2023 03:57:57 BST G. Branden Robinson wrote: > Not enough information to check signature validity. Show Details > > At 2023-04-30T02:42:33-0500, Dave Kemper wrote: > > On 4/27/23, Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcil...@dartmouth.edu> wrote: > > > "Semantic newline" warnings are relatively innocuous. The occasional > > > pitch on this mailing list for paragraph awareness is far less so. > > > > If you're referring here to changing groff's line-by-line processing > > to paragraph-at-once processing (via Knuth-Plass or similar > > algorithm), that's a central part of groff's 2014 mission statement > > (http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/groff-mission-statement.html, where > > it's billed as an "exciting challenge") and had widespread support > > when the mission statement was being assembled some 10 years ago. > > Maybe we should revisit/amend/re-ratify the mission statement since it's > been about 10 years. I've seen at least one prominent subscriber to > this list express reservations about whether Knuth-Plass is so great > after all. (I don't have a citation handy. It's somewhere in the list > archives in the past 5 years.) > > I don't think that view was necessarily an expression of sour grapes. > If I remember correctly, the observation was that K-P can cause slightly > irregular line lengths from one paragraph to the next. > > Myself, I wonder if K-P couldn't be implemented above the formatter > itself, using a diversion. We could then put the implementation in an > auxiliary macro package. Since I have plans to attack our facilities > for diversion re-processing anyway, it might be a good time to identify > any feature gaps we have that would make doing K-P this way more > difficult than it needs to be.
If you are interested in micro typography there was an interesting discussion some years ago, not K-P:- https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2002-02/msg00001.html The thesis to which they are referring can found here:- https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb21-4/tb69thanh.pdf It seems good to me. Cheers Deri
