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by raphman
116 days ago
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Hi cosmiciron, wow, few humans find time to be a film director and a chief scientist and work on open-source projects. What about these strangely written strange sentences in the README? What does that mean? > In the 1980s and 90s, serious software thought seriously about pages. Or this?: > Desktop publishing software understood widows, orphans, and the subtle difference between a line break and a paragraph break. As the difference between a line break and a paragraph break is really subtle -could you elaborate a little bit? |
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As for the strange sentences? Before the web turned everything into paperless, infinite scrolls, people actually cared deeply about printed materials. With that came the strict requirement for pagination rules, widows, orphans, and deterministic behavior for margins. In fact, one of my favorite pieces of tech was built exactly around solving the discrepancy between display and print: NeXTSTEP with its Display PostScript technology.
To answer your question about the subtle difference between a line and paragraph break: mathematically, they trigger completely different layout states in a typesetting engine. A line break (soft return) just wraps text to the next line while preserving the current block's alignment and justification math. A paragraph break (hard return) ends the semantic block entirely, triggering top/bottom margins, evaluating widow/orphan rules for the previous block, and resetting the layout cursor for the next.
I had to build an engine that deeply understands this difference because in the film industry, screenplays are still written in Courier with strictly measured spatial margins and peculiar contextual rules on how blocks of dialogue break across pages. So this tool is basically my homage to an era long gone...