One thought that was proposed back in the 80s was that just as line breaks are considered in the paragraph as a whole, page breaks could be considered in the do

One thought that was proposed back in the 80s was that just as line breaks are considered in the paragraph as a whole, page breaks could be considered in the document as a whole (TeX can’t do this—easily—being Turing complete, in theory it can do anything computable, but the speed would be atrocious). This could be managed by doing things like lengthening or shortening pairs of facing pages by a line or trying to tighten or loosen an individual paragraph to change the number of lines in it. A document formatter which comes at page breaks with the right level of abstraction of the data would be able to manage this with minimal or no human intervention (when I was typesetting Serif magazine with TeX in the 90s, I just went through and fixed page breaks manually which is a typical modern workflow as well).