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.