Re: Texinfo help, please

[Graham Percival]

On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 03:50:21PM +0200, David Kastrup wrote:
> Janek Warchoł <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 1:56 PM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
> >>
> >> "Phil Holmes" <address@hidden> writes:
> >> > It should wrap between the words "the file" and the filename.

+1

> > It would probably be less ugly that an overstretched line.  As for
> > "rephrasing" strategy, i find it not suited to our needs.  It's good
> > for publishers, whose job is to take care of such details when they
> > have an almost-ready-to-publish material.  We are not a publishing
> > house: we don't want to fiddle with typography in our manuals.  Also,
> > the manuals change, and the "rephrasing" solution is not flexible
> > enough.

+1

> Typography is not magic.  It has to obey the laws of physics.

...

The "law" that I want TeX to do is this:
- if a word would be printed in the right-hand margin, insert a
  line-break before that word.

That's it.  It's not a NP-hard problem.  It's not violating
conservation of mass and energy.  It's not invoking dice-rolling
for the fundamental particles in the universe.

> > Personally, i cannot understand how on Earth one could be satisfied
> > with such "i cannot solve this, it's your problem" approach of TeX to
> > this issue.
> 
> You can't solve the impossible.  Simple as that.  Tex picks the best
> solution from a set of solutions permitted by prescribed global and font
> parameters.  You get overfull hboxes if the solution set given those
> constraints is empty.

Sure.  So we're asking if TeX can be tweaked to consider
additional solutions.  (namely, "always add a line-break before
anything with an overfull hbox, regardless of what that makes the
rest of that paragraph look lik")

The answer could be "no, TeX is not flexible enough to do that".
Fair enough; we're accustomed to living within the limitations of
our tools.  But this isn't an "impossible" or "magical" request.

- Graham