[OS X TeX] overview of what TeX is producing

Maarten Sneep maarten.sneep at xs4all.nl
Tue Mar 1 10:21:38 EST 2005


On 1 mrt 2005, at 15:35, Jason Davies wrote:

>>
>> Somewhat. The memoir manual has a good discussion of page proportion,
>
>
> thanks (both) for those links...busy reading now....do we know what the
> opposition does? How does Word handle all these things?

Horribly.

> does it have its own algorithms etc? presumably they're secret...:-)

Because the program is used interactively, the algorithm is strictly 
forward
looking: fill one line, once it is full, push the word that didn't fit 
to the next
line, adjust the inter word spacing, and continue. It is a pretty 
braindead
algorithm, and it is the same used in most interactive applications, 
including
the Cocoa text object (InDesign is the notable exception). You can bet 
that
if things were different, the PR department would have tried to tell us 
all about it.

I can also imagine that an algorithm where you add a word to the end of 
a
sentence and it would adjust the first line, would -- at first -- feel 
highly
strange: "what did it do _that_ for".

Maarten

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