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I tried to read the paper, but it's behind a paywall so I am unable to confirm whether it gives any possible mechanism for solving rivers. But it seems highly u
by by 17y ago
I tried to read the paper, but it's behind a paywall so I am unable to confirm whether it gives any possible mechanism for solving rivers. But it seems highly unlikely because the alignment of word gaps from one line to the next, the cause of rivers, is entirely unrelated to getting nice word spacing on the lines themselves. The abstract makes no mention of trying to solve the problem of rivers or lakes. How does the algorithm solve rivers?
- Silhouette 17y agoAs I mentioned before, there is nothing explicit about "solving" rivers in the algorithm. The rarity of rivers is just a welcome side-effect of the mathematical formulation. The kind of river that is distracting is typically caused by an unfortunate combination of two things: having wide spaces between words, and having them aligned closely enough from one line to the next that the white space they cause joins up visually. TeX's hyphenation and justification algorithm is, in simple terms, trying to optimise for even spacing throughout a paragraph, with a bias towards using the natural spacing or as close to it as possible. Notably, it can do this by increasing or decreasing the space between words. In this environment, you are much less likely to get wide spaces in the first place than if you have a typical word processor algorithm that justifies line-by-line and only by increasing space. If the spaces aren't as wide, then they are less distracting in themselves, and there is less scope for them to overlap for several lines to form the long rivers that are so distracting to the reader. This doesn't mean that rivers are impossible using a TeX-style algorithm. It is just less likely to happen, and probably less noticeable if it does, than with a line-based H&J algorithm.
- by 17y agoI see, thank you.