5 ms·
Rivers
- antognini 1y agoThere is some interesting discussion on the LaTeX stack overflow page about the challenge of detecting and preventing rivers during the typesetting process: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/4507/avoiding-rivers-in-successive-lines-of-type https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/4507/avoiding-rivers... https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/29049/how-to-define-the-badness-of-a-river https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/29049/how-to-define-... And if you really want to get into it, there is a rather detailed paper by Alex Holkner: https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/tex/2006-holkner.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/tex/2006-holkner.pdf Avoiding rivers becomes a rather non-trivial optimization problem. In Holkner's paper he found that it took ~1 minute just to typeset 1200 words. Some of his experiments took more than six hours to complete.
- rendall 1y agoFutility Closet had a cheerful, wholesome podcast for many years until abruptly ending it without much explanation. Glad to see they're still busy. Anyone know what happened? I always wondered.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoI was under the impression they simply wanted to take a break. I thought the break was to be more permanent... but perhaps they found they couldn't quit it.
- rendall 1y agoThey said in their penultimate podcast episode (2021-11-22) that the Futility Closet blog would continue but that the following episode would be their last.
- antognini 1y agoI'm just impressed that the website is still around and they are adding new items. They've been going for more than twenty years at this point!
- fdslkfsld 1y ago[dead]
- faeeafeae 1y ago[dead]
- flobosg 1y agoSince Christian Bök’s Xenotext was recently discussed here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43974005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43974005), check out “The March of the Nucleotides”: https://x.com/christianbok/status/1064741910948995072 https://x.com/christianbok/status/1064741910948995072 In this case the edges of the river represent DNA base pairs: A on one side has always a T in front of it; the same with C and G.
- aidenn0 1y ago> Because they’re distracting, these artifacts are generally discouraged ... > (squint to see it) This seems rather contradictory?
- eddyg 1y agoWebKit is addressing this problem. https://webkit.org/blog/16547/better-typography-with-text-wrap-pretty/ https://webkit.org/blog/16547/better-typography-with-text-wr...