Re: [Groff] Formatting algorithm

[Denis M. Wilson]

Brave statement -- good luck!

Unlike TeX, troff has no modes, so a method of delimiting a paragraph has to
be introduced. Text outside would be treated as currently, text inside would
be subject to whatever algorithm is selected.  Some care to get this right
should be taken, as for macro sets to take advantage of this some rewriting
will be required anyway.

What does Heirloom troff do?

I have long wished for a shaped paragraph facility, it would make many tasks
so much easier. Could this be incorporated? Unless paragraphs with holes were
required, it would just be required to specify a sequence of
(indent, line length) pairs.

Denis

On Mon, 14 Apr 2014 13:14:58 +0200
Ulrich Lauther <address@hidden> wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 07:44:07PM -0400, Peter Schaffter wrote:
> > Here's the bare bones version of the algorithm I was thinking of
> > when I proposed improving line formatting by getting groff to
> > shoulder the burden for some of the work we do manually.  It's
> > written out in brute-force pseudo-code; should be pretty clear.
> > 
> > The aim is not to find optimal breaks in Knuthian fashion, but to
> > improve the uniformity of grey from line to line using a greedy
> > algorithm.  Key features are that letterspacing and wordspacing are
> > orthogonal, and that NextWord can be read during optimization.
> > 
> Even if a greedy algorithm will be implemented, it should have
> the whole paragraph available as input.
> That way, one could easily switch over to a KP-implementation and
> compare the two appraoches in terms of quality, running time, and
> code complexity.
> Provided a clean interface and input/output specifications are
> available I would volunteer to implement the dynamic programming (KP)
> variant.
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
>      ulrich lauther
> 


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