"A complex index" in _Digital Typography_

[ecashin@coe.uga.edu (Ed L. Cashin)]

Hi.  In reading Knuth's _Digital Typography_ at lunch today, I came
across a section of the "Breaking Paragraphs into Lines" chapter that
relates directly to a difficulty in a project I'm doing.

In the section "A complex index", pp. 98ff., it describes a way to do
line breaking on an index entry such that the "name" part (on the
left) is ragged right and the "reference" part (on the right) is
ragged left, like this:

      |                                                       |
      | foo bar baz and even more........... 1100, 2000, 3300 |
      |                                                       |

      |                                      |
      | foo bar baz and even more ......     | 
      |                     1100, 2000, 3300 |
      |                                      |

      |                      |
      | foo bar baz and      |
      |    even more         |
      |     .... 1100, 2000, |
      |                 3300 |
      |                      |

I was planning on using perl to doctor the input text so that such
complex line-breaking decisions were unnecessary, but I'm wondering
now whether this might be something that people have already tackled. 

Is there support in ConTeXt for such complex line breaking strategies?
The criteria Knuth (and Plass) describe in the "A complex index"
section are pretty involved.

-- 
--Ed Cashin                     PGP public key:
  ecashin@coe.uga.edu           http://www.coe.uga.edu/~ecashin/pgp/