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

A Thought…

A lawyer died and was standing in front of St. Peter at the Pearly Gates.
St. Peter said, “you can’t come in here… you have to go to the other place.”
But the lawyer was really good and pleaded his case to the point where St. Peter said, “OK… here’s what I’ll do. You will spend the same amount of time in Hell as you did on earth, and then you can spend the rest of eternity up here.”
The lawyer figured this wasn’t too bad of a deal, so he said “OK”.
St. Peter said, “Great… I’ll see you in 350 years.”
The lawyer said, “But, how is that possible… I’m only 65 years old!”
St. Peter said, “We go by billing hours.”

— Charles, Dilbert comic letters

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.

News:

A Thought…

Perl library for line-splitting (paragraph shaping)

Links to files and information for Text::KnuthPlass…

What is it?