[NTG-context] Re: “breaking news”

[Hans Hagen <j.hagen@xs4all.nl>]

On 9/30/2024 10:45 PM, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:
> Am 30.09.24 um 20:14 schrieb Hans Hagen:
>> On 9/30/2024 6:22 PM, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>> since the latest update, I have differences in line/paragraph/page 
>>> breaking. I should have expected that vz and granular aren’t stable 
>>> yet, but maybe it’s a problem in my setup and not even related to 
>>> that update.
>>>
>>> * widow and orphan penalties seem to work different, preferring empty 
>>> lines over single lines.
>>> * looseness doesn’t seem to work any more.
>>>
>>> Were there changes?
>>
>> Not intentionally. We're bringing widow and club penalties stepwise 
>> under \setupalign control so maybe something was forgotten. For 
>> instance, \widowpenalty and \widowpenalties are competing and the next 
>> upload will deal with that (first we need to test some complex 
>> documents).
> 
> It’s probably something I changed and can’t find it in my git log.
> 
> Generally it seems to be a bit better than before, needs less trickery, 
> but it’s different enough that I had to start work on my current book 
> from the beginning.
> 
> It’s a novel of ~650 pages with a big range of paragraph lengths (some 
> dialogues with short lines as well as paragraphs that span pages). “Of 
> course” you often get a 3-line paragraph over a page break – it’s hard 
> to avoid widows and orphans.

depends .. three liners can be made to work in fact one should then use 
\widowpenalties and \clubpenalties with a high value for the first two 
entries (and maybe disable them to overlap)

here is a teaser:

\permanent \specificationdef \lesswidowpenalties \widowpenalties
     \plusthree options 
\numexpr\largestspecificationoptioncode+\doublespecificationoptioncode\relax
     \plusfivethousand    \plusseventyfivehundred
     \plustwohundredfifty \plusfivehundred
     \zerocount           \zerocount
\relax

\permanent \specificationdef \lessclubpenalties \clubpenalties
     \plusthree options 
\numexpr\largestspecificationoptioncode+\doublespecificationoptioncode\relax
     \plusfivethousand    \plusseventyfivehundred
     \plustwohundredfifty \plusfivehundred
     \zerocount           \zerocount
\relax

used in upcoming new \setupalign options lesswidows and lessclubs 
because the above is not something that users should nother about.

These set high penalties for the first and last line, somewhat lower for 
the ones following and preceding.

We also have strictwidows and strictclubs that do your three thing.

In case you wonder about the 'double' ... we can have different values 
for left and right pages because (we think that) on a spread a widow or 
club is less of a problem.

Fwiw, much of this of this already has been there for a while (as 
discussed at the meeting) but we're now integrating it into \setupalign 
and making sure that the overhead can be neglected.

> I already do without grid, VZ works, HZ also should (I didn’t check with 
> a tracker, and it’s not so extreme that I’d see it), but it’s not enough 
> to automatically avoid single lines.

Indeed, so the stricter penalties combine well with vz

> If a paragraph starts at page breaks, I can tweak the layout like
> \page\setuplayout[narrow]. I defined narrow, normal, and wide versions 
> with 1 mm difference. Before I didn’t know you can call named layouts 
> like this, also relative page numbers like \definelayout[+1][wide] are 
> nice.
> 
> If that’s not enough, I’m using \letterspacing with tiny ± values.
> 
> So much about dirty tricks. ;)

parpasses will permit you to have steps with different solutions so 
expansion can be delayed till it is really needed; interesting is that 
even with (say 8) par passes, most time the solution is found in the 
first (no hyphenation with 100 tolerance) or second pass (hyphenation 
with 200 tolerance) and the number last pass can be counted on one hand

(there are options to mark pararaphs and see what pass succeeded as well 
as overviews in the logs so that one can go to problematic places but 
that's for Keith to experiment with)

We're really surprised how well this all works on complex content (say 
very math intense, read: demanmding wrt where to break).

Hans

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                                           Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
               Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
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