> On Mar 4, 2018, at 1:50 PM, Ralph Corderoy wrote: > > Hi Doug, > > Bakul wrote: >> I remembered reading about Knuth's line-breaking algorithm in Software >> Practice & Experience in early eighties and being quite impressed with >> it. So may be that clear description of the algorithm has something >> to do with it? Ah, here it is: >> >> “Breaking Paragraphs into lines” by Donald Knuth & Plass, SP&E, Volume >> 11, issue 11, Nov. 1981 > > That's more to do with TeX looking at the whole paragraph when deciding > where to split lines. Hyphenation is part of that because a word might > help out by being the ideal thing to split and have the rest of the > lines sit easily in their length, but TeX's hyphenation algorithm is > distinct again. > > Ted Harding gives some background on the groff list back in 2001, > https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2001-03/msg00026.html > but I expect groff used TeX's algorithm because it was published, could > handle multiple languages, e.g. hyphen.us, and the data files were > available to contort into what groff ended up using in its simplified > TeX algorithm. > > $ cd /usr/share/groff/1.22.3/tmac > $ ls hyphen* > hyphen.den hyphenex.cs hyphenex.us hyphen.sv hyphen.us > hyphen.cs hyphen.det hyphenex.de hyphen.fr > $ > > They've comments explaining their content. > > Werner Lemburg on the groff list probably knows for certain as he had to > fathom all this out before becoming groff's excellent maintainer for > many years. > > -- > Cheers, Ralph. > https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy Thanks Ralph and Toby. “Because it was clearly described and published” was the point I was trying to make and should’ve stopped there : ). SP&E article had made a strong impression on me and that is what I instantly thought of.