URL:
<https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?65558>
Summary: [UPGRADE] improve paragraph formatting within
groff's line-at-a-time processing
Group: GNU roff
Submitter: barx
Submitted: Thu 04 Apr 2024 11:52:22 PM CDT
Category: Core
Severity: 1 - Wish
Item Group: Feature change
Status: None
Privacy: Public
Assigned to: None
Open/Closed: Open
Discussion Lock: Any
Planned Release: None
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Follow-up Comments:
-------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu 04 Apr 2024 11:52:22 PM CDT By: Dave <barx>
Bug #40716 seeks to bring TeX's Knuth-Plass algorithm to groff. This is in
progress but is a monumental, and thus slow, task.
The 2014 Groff Mission Statement
(http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/groff-mission-statement.html) offers K-P as
"the most likely candidate" for improving groff's paragraph formatting. But
discussion that took place around the time this mission statement was being
drafted reveals other contenders.
As an alternative that's simpler to implement, since it doesn't require
changing groff's underlying line-by-line approach, Peter posted this
pseudocode: http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2014-03/msg00322.html
(The thread continues in several pieces not linked to each other:
* http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2014-04/msg00021.html
* http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2014-05/msg00000.html
* http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2014-05/msg00010.html
* http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2014-05/msg00041.html
* http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2014-06/msg00089.html
)
Years later, Peter wrote (http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2020-07/msg00101.html):
"I worked on systems that used the formatting strategy I proposed and can
confirm that it significantly reduced the amount of intervention required to
achieve good grey on a line-by-line basis."
Consensus seems to be that K-P provides the best known automated results, but
given how extensive a change that is, in the interim if someone is willing to
turn Peter's pseudocode into working groff code, this could be a substantially
lower hurdle providing quite good results.
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