Re: Mission statement and Knuth-Plass reconsidered

[Deri]

On Sunday, 7 May 2023 03:57:57 BST G. Branden Robinson wrote:
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> 
> At 2023-04-30T02:42:33-0500, Dave Kemper wrote:
> > On 4/27/23, Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> > > "Semantic newline" warnings are relatively innocuous. The occasional
> > > pitch on this mailing list for paragraph awareness is far less so.
> > 
> > If you're referring here to changing groff's line-by-line processing
> > to paragraph-at-once processing (via Knuth-Plass or similar
> > algorithm), that's a central part of groff's 2014 mission statement
> > (http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/groff-mission-statement.html, where
> > it's billed as an "exciting challenge") and had widespread support
> > when the mission statement was being assembled some 10 years ago.
> 
> Maybe we should revisit/amend/re-ratify the mission statement since it's
> been about 10 years.  I've seen at least one prominent subscriber to
> this list express reservations about whether Knuth-Plass is so great
> after all.  (I don't have a citation handy.  It's somewhere in the list
> archives in the past 5 years.)
> 
> I don't think that view was necessarily an expression of sour grapes.
> If I remember correctly, the observation was that K-P can cause slightly
> irregular line lengths from one paragraph to the next.
> 
> Myself, I wonder if K-P couldn't be implemented above the formatter
> itself, using a diversion.  We could then put the implementation in an
> auxiliary macro package.  Since I have plans to attack our facilities
> for diversion re-processing anyway, it might be a good time to identify
> any feature gaps we have that would make doing K-P this way more
> difficult than it needs to be.

If you are interested in micro typography there was an interesting discussion 
some years ago, not K-P:-

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2002-02/msg00001.html

The thesis to which they are referring can found here:-

https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb21-4/tb69thanh.pdf

It seems good to me.

Cheers 

Deri