[NTG-context] Re: “breaking news”

[Henning Hraban Ramm <texml@fiee.net>]

Am 01.10.24 um 00:17 schrieb Hans Hagen:
>> 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)

I have
\setpenalties\widowpenalties{2}{8000}
\setpenalties\clubpenalties{2}{10000}

Does this make sense? While I saw in your demonstrations that it’s 
possible to set different penalties per line, I never tried.

Otherwise, I found out the easiest solution is a \vbox, VZ does the 
rest. Should have thought of that earlier, would have saved me a few hours.

> 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.

Ok, I’m looking forward to it.

> 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.

Great!

>> 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

Yes, you demonstrated several times. I just didn’t dare or was too lazy 
to delve into the “plain TeX” syntax to try.

> (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: demanding wrt where to break).

If it also works with code examples, It’ll be great for the ConTeXt 
journal and my book.

Hraban
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