4 Mar
2018
4 Mar
'18
10:32 p.m.
On 2018-03-04 4:00 PM, Bakul Shah wrote:
On Mar 4, 2018, at 12:42 PM, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com
<mailto:clemc@ccc.com>> wrote:
That's the line breaker, which is an important contributor to the
quality of TeX output.
But TeX's *hyphenation* algorithm per se was invented by Franklin Mark
Liang and was indeed considerably better than its predecessors and
competitors (including most or all commercial typesetting software --
which was a big part of the motivation for it):
https://tug.org/docs/liang/liang-thesis.pdf
--Toby
On Sun, Mar 4, 2018 at 3:23 PM, Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu
<mailto:doug@cs.dartmouth.edu>> wrote:
I hadn't realized that groff hyphenation had been taken from
Tex, not troff. Is that becuase Tex did a better job, or
because troff's was deemed proprietary?
Given the author, I would guess the later as he wanted to be FOSS and
would not have looked at the ditroff source - but that guess is worth
just that ;-)
I remembered reading about Knuth's line-breaking algorithm in
Software Practice & Experience in early eighties and being quite
impressed with it. So may be that clear description of the algorithm
has something to do with it? Ah, here it is:
“Breaking Paragraphs into lines” by Donald Knuth & Plass,
SP&E, Volume 11, issue 11, Nov. 1981
(Download from Wiley is not free)