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Old 09-02-2009, 09:47 AM   #467
WillAdams
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jbjb,

The appropriate cite for ``typography is not a machine solvable problem'' would be the Knuth-Plass paper ``Breaking Paragraphs into Lines'', D.E. Knuth and M.F. Plass, chapter 3 of _Digital Typography_, CSLI Lecture Notes #78.

Please note that there is no H&J algorithm which can successfully detect and prevent ``stacks'' or rivers --- it seems to be (to use the formal computing term) ``NP Complete'' --- I'd be very interested in any research or algorithm which makes this a solvable problem.

There're even fewer efforts to solve typographic problems at a level larger than a page --- and I've frequently had to relay an entire chapter because of how the last page fell out --- Here's a list of the current research on this:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp....9?dmode=source

So, unless someone has an example of an implementation which will automatically paginate a text and _not_ allow stacks, orphans or other bad breaks, I believe that the above references should stand as the requested citation to demonstrate that, ``typography is not a machine solvable problem''.

William
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