Lacking Natural Simplicity

An interesting message thread developed on the groff mailing list about various features of Groff and Heirloom Troff, with a mention of neatroff. In particular, Steve Izma's post (P1) discussed how he found TeX's paragraph-at-a-time justification required as much tweaking as groff's simpler paragraph justification. That lead to Peter Schaffter's post (P2) linking to an earlier post (P3) where he proposed a simpler algorithm to improve Groff's line-breaking and justification than the full Knuth-Plass Line-Breaking Algorithm (KP1, D1) that TeX uses. While writing this post I ran across another paper, “Global multiple objective line breaking” by Alex Holkner (GMOLB1, GMOLB2) that explores another line breaking algorithm and references some of the other papers on the subject.