[TacticalCoder]

That line-breaking link is really great, I enjoyed it a lot! However it barely scratches the surface: there's no good line-breaking without hyphenation. And then even once you have a great H & J algorithm (Hyphenation and Justification), you have the visual problem of "rivers" (be it text or print): a "river" behind when on one line you have the space between two words nearly matching another space between two words on the next line, then third line, etc.

I don't know if modern typesetting software like InDesign do solve this automatically or not. The web certainly don't (although with CSS and the "shy" Unicode char you at least get some control on the 'H' part of "H & J"). Back in my typesetting days QuarkXPress had nothing to help with rivers: you had to detect them visually and then "fudge" the paragraph a bit (by forcing a line-break or an hyphenation).

I always wondered: certainly if you start with a good H & J algorithm, it must be possible to try a few candidates and determine, programatically, which one has the least obvious rivers? Fascinating stuff IMHO.

P.S: I also wonder if it's because algorithms for layout out paragraphs are so bad on the web that justification is typically frowned upon on the Web? (it certainly rules king in printed books)

[raphlinus]

Android has a sophisticated algorithm for line breaking, including hyphenation. It's similar to that of InDesign (both were strongly inspired by the Knuth-Plass algorithm used by TeX), but tuned for mobile use. In particular, it's pretty shy about adding hyphens, but if a well-placed hyphen will prevent a two-line sentence from spilling to three (in which the last word is by itself), it will do so fairly aggressively. I'm quite proud of that.

Unfortunately, I don't have a good writeup of that, but some of the details are in this ATypI talk[1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8LD0BM-Vjk

[maxwell86]

Sounds like a topic for your blog.

[OnlyMortal]

It’s been many a year since I thought of XPress.

I recall I did a Mac XPress XTension that used GUSI (sockets) to talk to a 4D server to grab artwork. I even had it multi-threading (co-operative of course) and a UI using PowerPlant. Rather a hack.