[texhax] using larger units to determine breaks?

[Tim McKenzie]

On Thursday 07 May 2009 02:48:49 William Adams wrote:
> On May 6, 2009, at 8:34 AM, Toby Cubitt wrote:
> > Or maybe optimal pagination is undecidable :-)
>
> Aye, there lays the rub! A lot of this is subjective and any algorithm
> would need the ability to control things like:

As you suggest, the subjectivity may make the job difficult, but if you can 
choose an objective measure of acceptability of page-breaks (hopefully roughly 
coinciding with your subjective judgments), then optimal pagination of any 
particular document won't be *logically* undecidable: just try every 
possibility, and choose the one with the best measure of acceptability.

For those interested, the TeX Development Fund's wishlist at 
https://www.tug.org/tc/devfund/criteria.html includes:
"Page-breaking: apply something like the same optimization to breaking pages 
in the document as is done for breaking lines in a paragraph. Perhaps 
something can be done by having TeX output the boxes in the log file with 
\showlists, and then writing a separate program, as described in Jonathan 
Fine's article TeX Forever in the EuroTeX 2005 proceedings. (Research level.)"

Tim
<><
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
Url : http://tug.org/pipermail/texhax/attachments/20090507/3a822460/attachment.bin