Re: a question of hyphenation policy

[Robert Thorsby]

On 30/8/24 20:54, Tadziu Hoffmann wrote:
> > \s[-X]\H[+X]text to be kerned goes here\H[0]\s0
>
> I believe distorting the shapes of letters is even more frowned
> upon in typesetting circles than consecutive hyphenation is.

I agree that if the distortion becomes visible then it was the wrong 
tool for the job. But I stand by my claim that reasonable distortions 
are totally invisible on the printed page.

Tadziu, were you referring to your language (where I *think* hyphenation 
would always be necessary)?


> As a practical approach to manually optimizing the line
> breaks in a paragraph, I have found that twiddling the space
> size using .ss often leads to acceptable results.  Also,
> using \p (or .brp) to break-and-stretch a line earlier in a
> paragraph can sometimes lead to nicer line breaks later on
> in the paragraph.

Again, I agree that in the absence of whole-of-paragraph manipulation we 
are stuck with line-by-line manipulation. And this requires a lot of 
manual intervention, using every tool at hand. Remember, often this has 
to be done to resolve issues other than hyphenation (e.g., widows and 
orphans.

In the final analysis, typesetting is an art not a science, and we will 
never be able to eliminate the requirement for human intervention. 
Scientific tools will assist us but they won't replace us.

Robert Thorsby