Towards More Homogeneous Paragraphs
Type
Event
Date
Sep 2, 2025 — Sep 5, 2025
Location
Nottingham University
Nottingham, CA
Abstract
Paragraph justification is based primarily on shrinking or stretching the
interword blanks. While the blanks on a line are all scaled by the same
amout, the amount in question varies from line to line. The quality of a
paragraph’s typographic color largely depends on the aforementioned
variation being as small as possible. Yet, \TeX’s paragraph justification
algorithm addresses this problem in a rather coarse fashion. In this paper,
we propose a refinement to the algorithm allowing to improve the situation
without disturbing the general behavior of the algorithm too much, and
without the need for manual intervention. We analyze the impact of our
refinement on a large number of experiments through several statistical
estimators. We also exhibit a number of typographical traits related to
whitespace distribution that we believe may contribute to our perception of
homogeneousness.