From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <1801f1e36fd913d459b5ab0edcfb6940@quanstro.net>
From: erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2009 11:52:52 -0500
To: 9fans@9fans.net
In-Reply-To: <1233247208.4412.116.camel@goose.sun.com>
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Subject: Re: [9fans] Small program "PlanKey" (paraphrase of DOSKey)
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> You've hit the nail on the head with this comment. It seems that almost
> all layout systems spend 99% of their smarts laying out blocks of
> graphic information *and* trying to figure out how to make text be
> still "self-layingout". And I do mean all: from TeX, lout, all the
> way to HTML/CSS.

i think there's hope.  boxes-n-glue is simple enough.  within a text
box, layout could be the same as today.  gluing boxes together is fairly
straightforward.  (just steal knuth's algorithms.)  i think a good
bit of τεχ's complexity is in that last smidge of layout doctoring
and the fact that everything needs to fit on a page.  if you
get rid of kerning, hyphenation, hbadness, vbadness, etc. by
using the current text layout algorithm, it might just be reasonable.

- erik