Dear collegues,
I'm happy to announce that the following paper has been accepted at
DocEng 2025 (the 25th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering).
TOWARD MORE HOMOGENEOUS PARAGRAPHS
The primary way to justify a paragraph is to adjust the interword blanks
by stretching or shrinking them within an easthetically acceptable
range, so that each line of text reaches the required paragraph width.
While the resulting whitespace "scaling" is applied uniformly to every
blank on a line, the exact amount varies from line to line.
Unfortunately, the quality of a paragraph's typographic grey largely
depends on the aforementioned variation being as small as possible.
In spite of its notoriously high typesetting quality, TeX's paragraph
justification algorithm, the so-called "Knuth-Plass", addresses this
problem in a rather coarse fashion. In this paper, we propose a
refinement to the algorithm allowing to improve the situation without
disturbing the general behavior of the algorithm too much, and without
the need for manual intervention.
A comparative study of our refinement versus the original version on a
large number of experiments allows us to provide an in-depth analysis of
the scaling variation across paragraph lines. We are able to extract a
number of typographical traits that may impact our perception of how
homogeneous the scaling is across all lines. For each of these traits,
we provide statistical indicators allowing to asses the comparative
behavior of our refinement against the original algorithm.
--
Resistance is futile. You will be jazzimilated.
Lisp, Jazz, Aïkido: http://www.didierverna.info
