[texhax] using larger units to determine breaks?

[Morten Høgholm]

On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 1:34 PM, William Adams wrote:

> The problem is solutions tend to be intricate and inter-connected and
> I've occasionally found myself going back to the beginning of a
> chapter to make the last page work out properly.

Oh yes. This is the really fun part of the production... sometimes you
are lucky and you change one little thing which makes 50 pages fall
nicely into place, other times it just doesn't work no matter what you
do.

> Lessee, one has a 100,000 word novel w/ 20 chapters, so average 5,000
> words per chapter, each paragraph has on average of five sentences of
> five words each, so 200 paragraphs in a chapter, figure 50 characters
> (a bit long, but I'm trying to make the math easy) per line, and 10
> characters per word (ditto) so 1,000 lines, figure 25 lines per page,
> so 40 pages, so one has to work out how 200 paragraphs of more-or-less
> 1,000 lines inter-act w/ 40 page breaks --- I'll leave it to someone
> who does combinatorial mathematics to work out how many possibilities
> there are if one-fourth the paragraphs can gain a line, one-fourth can
> lose a line, one-fourth gain _or_ lose a line and the balance are
> inflexible and unyielding and won't change their line lengths w/
> reasonable type settings.
>
> It's probably w/in reach of modern equipment, but it won't be a fast
> typesetting run.

There is of course Michael Plass' thesis on the matter "Optimal
pagination techniques for automatic typesetting systems" and also
Stefan Wohlfeil's "On the pagination of complex documents". The latter
came with a program - XFORMATTER I believe - to make the pagination
choices.

-- 
Morten