Dear all,
I'm happy to announce that the following paper has been accepted at the
TUG 2023 conference, Bonn, July 14-16 2023.
Interactive and Real-Time Typesetting for Demonstration and Experimentation
Abstract:
In general, typesetting experimentation is not a very practical thing to do.
WYSIWYG typesetting systems are very reactive but do not offer highly
configurable algorithms, and TeX, with its separate development / compilation
/ visualization phases, is not as interactive as its WYSIWYG competitors.
Being able to experiment with typesetting algorithms interactively and in
real-time is nevertheless desirable, for instance for demonstration purposes,
or for rapid prototyping and debugging of new ideas.
We present ETAP (Experimental Typesetting Algorithms Platform), a tool written
to ease typesetting experimentation and demonstration. ETAP currently provides
several paragraph justification algorithms, all with many configuration
options such as kerning, ligatures, flexible spaces, sloppiness, hyphenation,
etc. The resulting paragraph is displayed with many visual hints as well, such
as paragraph, character, and line boxes, baselines, over/underfullness hints,
hyphenation clues, etc. All these parameters, along with the desired paragraph
width, are adjustable interactively through a GUI, and the resulting paragraph
is displayed and updated in real-time.
But ETAP can also be used without, or in conjunction with the GUI, as a
scriptable application. In particular, it is able to generate all sorts of
statistical reports or charts on the behavior of the various algorithms, for
instance, the number of over/underfull boxes per paragraph width, the average
compression or stretch ratio per line, whatever else you want. This allows you
to quickly demonstrate or evaluate the comparative behavior or merits of the
provided algorithms, or whichever you may want to add to the pool.
--
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