[frabjous]

Originally Posted by ahi

The plausibility of hyphenation software being as good as a human being was discussed already. After some superhuman amount of distributed effort (presumably going on for years, if not decades) it might start to approach.

We were discussing what LaTeX could or couldn't "find". I had in mind was something that knew, for every word in a book, where the syllable breaks are, and so knew where it was even appropriate to hyphenate. I won't speak for other languages, but for English, this is not at all infeasible or even far from reality. (In fact, I'll go further: it is reality for LaTeX, so long as a book maker manually sets it for words LaTeX doesn't know, which in most cases will be few and finite.) All the things that have been said against it are just mistaken, as far as I can tell.

Once you have that, you have a program that can "find" all the possible patterns for a paragraph. The next, bigger, hurdle is choosing between these patterns. If you mean something that can find the "ideal" hyphenation patterns for an entire paragraph, I think LaTeX does that reasonably well when it has a decent line length to work with. As good as a human? I know of no reason to think any but the very best human typographers can do better. Getting something that will do as well as the very best typographers may be a long way off, but I haven't really heard--at least for English--any argument to the effect that it isn't practically possible, even within a few years.

In the meantime, with an average-sized book, an hour or two worth of human attention will continue to achieve the same thing. We're definitely desperately looking for suboptimal solutions to already solved problems.

Well, you don't seem to have any desire for reflowable format. I think you'll have to admit that many other people do. That's the unsolved problem.

I will be demanding a fixed layout and (at least some) manual attention. Given how little this actually requires from the publisher... I'm not sure why others see it as impractically onerous.

I agree with this: there is no reason why publishers couldn't offer a fixed format, or 3 or 5, for each book they sell, and I think they should continue to do so until a much better unfixed-format renderer is found or used.