Hi Fop Team,
Simon Pepping a écrit :
By looking for this reference, I found the following article:On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 08:19:24AM -0700, Victor Mote wrote:
Jeremias Maerki wrote:
While looking for material on page breaking I found several references to this document:
http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/fullcit/8124134
Does anyone know if it's worth ordering and waiting for it?
www.pi6.fernuni-hagen.de/publ/tr234.pdf
It's entitled 'On the Pagination of Complex Documents' (actually it's also referencing Plass). I've read parts of this article and it seems interesting. It's well written, quite easy to understand and provides a better algorithm than TeX's one. And it's also more recent. It doesn't agree with Plass about the NP-hard problem of page layout. Indeed that depends on the formula we are using to estimate the badness of a layout. It proposes another formula which seems more reasonable and better corresponds to a reader's expectations.
Perhaps it could provide a good basis? I don't have Knuth's 'Digital Typography' (I'm considering purchasing it). It may be worthwhile to compare this article with what is in the book.
>
The TeX program is described in 'TeX The Program'. That text is weaved into the program code according to Knuth's literate programming system. It can be freely extracted from the program code.
I've already done it, and AFAICT it's not easy to find the way in all the TeX stuff (actually nothing is easy with TeX ;-)). I can send you the pdf file if you want, feel free to ask me.
Be warned, though: it's a 535 pages (!) document that entirely describes the TeX program. I've started looking into it, and, well, it's rather cryptic. It's very close to the implementation, it seems to be difficult to get a general idea of what it's doing. But I'll investigate a bit more.
And, as Simon wrote, TeX is excellent in line-breaking but not as good in page-breaking. It was implemented in the early 80's when memory was expensive.
However, it was written with typographic quality in mind, and that's why it may be a good idea to try getting some hints from it.
Vincent
