> I feel your pain, but someone should say it out loud: what you want is
> not possible in general.
Indeed, thanks for volunteering :-)
> \discretionary is not powerful enough, since it
> can only break one word in two, nothing else.
Right. \discretionary acts on hyphenation, which is only a part of
the general line-breaking problem. And that problem is hard enough as
it is.
> I am no expert on those newfangled TeX variants involving some
> other (less ideosyncratic) programming languages, but I venture the
> guess that my statement is valid also for them; someone please correct
> me if I'm wrong.
If you mean LuaTeX, then it's definitely possible there, although the
naïve implementation (just try all the possible alternatives) is subject
to combinatorial explosion -- precisely what Knuth succeeded in avoiding
by devising TeX's current line-breaking algorithm.
Arthur
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