======================================================================== Date: Wed, 4 Nov 92 08:44:59 CET Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Holger Poggel Subject: Break-Algorithmn I'm new in NTS, but it seems to me, that the discussion ist to "atomistic" (or I'm member of the wrong discussion??). During a professional layout-project I think I've met some traps of TeX. My suggestions: A noninteractive system must be almost perfect in breaking lines and pages, especially in multicolumn-output, because it ist troublesome to change ugly pieces of text by hand. I have noted a long list of wishes, in which most items affects pagebreaks and vertical spacing (and hyphenation, but perfect hypenation in the german language will stay an impossible thing). For pagebreaking: isn't it possible, like TeX paragraph-breaking, to hold a buffer of text and delay the final break until a hard pagebreak is reached, for example at a the begin of a chapter? In my opinion, the most important matter is a transparent (!) (not penalty here and demerit there and obsession somewhere) high-level typesetting language, where I can say exactly what I want and which priority my wishes shall own. There are many impossible wishes, of course, but a clearly set of rules and requests can be observed, I'm sure. holger poggel university of siegen inst. for surface-engineering instead of a silly and nebulous sentence