Quote:
Originally Posted by ahi
Frabjuous, LaTeX cannot find enough correct hyphenation patterns for any given text of meaningful length to avoid overfull boxes... unless you basically include everything in a \begin{sloppypar} ... \end{sloppypar} ... which results in underfull boxes galore.
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This is true only if you leave things at their default settings, which do assume a relatively normal paper page-size, but all you just need to change the \emergencystretch variable to something like 11pt, and you'll get rid of the overfull boxes.
Depending on the line width, you may get a lot of underfull boxes, though this really this has nothing to do with not "finding" hyphenation. If the line width is too small, there quite simply aren't enough choices to avoid some underfull lines, and it's something you have to put up with. No amount of even manual tweaking is going to fix that. You'll see such result in newsprint all the time.
This is not a problem with LaTeX -- it's a matter of facts of geometry. When line lengths are smaller, there are fewer options with regard to what
can be put on a given line, and this increases the possibility that no "acceptable" breaking can be found. Do you really think the problem is not finding the right hyphenation patterns? I think even if hyphenation rules were given individually for every word, you'd still see this phenomenon with shorter lines.
Again, I can't think of any reason at all to think that anything a human can do, a computer couldn't be programmed to do, including identifying stacks and rivers and including them in its determination of what layouts are better than others. If LaTeX isn't now doing what a human would do, give me some reason to think that a better algorithm isn't possible. No reason has been given. (Theoretical arguments about the problem not being NP-complete are irrelevant, and no one has done anything but "cite authority" otherwise.)
Surely what humans do when they hand-tweak is still a rule-governed activity which has serious constraints put on by the nature of the text. When aesthetics are involved, it may be hard to put those rules into words, or code an algorithm to do the same, but I can't think of why it's not possible. Maybe LaTeX isn't there yet, and maybe it'll be awhile until we are, but it just seems to me to be some kind of strange of human-elitism to think it's not even possible. People have made claims of the form "computers will never be able to do X" numerous times in the past and have been proven wrong time and again. Maybe this is not the best place for an argument over artificial intelligence though.
But I'm not sure what we're arguing about. I think we agree that in the meantime, if we want a reflowable format, let's just use the best algorithm available, and put up with the imperfections. I certainly wouldn't be opposed to including, within an ebook, a "default" setting that had a fixed format established by a human, that was deviated from only if the user wanted to reflow the text to customize the font size or margins, etc. I'd be all for that.