CTS's Free Downloadable Computer Software: Text::KnuthPlass

A Thought…

Calvin: I like to verb words.

Hobbes: What?

Calvin: I take nouns and adjectives and use them as verbs. Remember when “ACCESS” was a thing? Now it’s something you do. It got verbed.

Verbing weirds language.

Hobbes: Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding.

— Calvin and Hobbes

Perl library for line-splitting (paragraph shaping)

Links to files and information for Text::KnuthPlass…

What is it?

Text::KnuthPlass uses the famed Knuth-Plass line-splitting algorithm (used in TeX and LaTeX) to break up a text string into a properly "shaped" paragraph. Certain rules are followed to not only efficiently pack the paragraph into a minimal number of lines, but also to minimize hyphenation, keep line density fairly constant, and take other measures to ensure that the output is typographically "nice looking". It works with both fixed-width fonts and with proportional (variable-width) fonts, where you supply the font library that calculates word lengths (e.g., PDF::Builder's advancewidth() method). Text::KnuthPlass permits varying line lengths, to allow text to flow around other objects, such as illustrations. It also makes use of (by default) Text::Hyphen, a library to indicate where words can be split (for hyphenation purposes).

See also this blog on Paragraph Shaping for a deeper dive into the subject.