[Talk] Demystifying the Knuth-Plass (in French)

[Paulo Ney de Souza]

A very curious thing is that, in Japanese, apparently InDesign is much
better than TeX in page composition.

Paulo Ney

On Sat, Jan 20, 2024 at 9:10 AM Paulo Ney de Souza <pauloney at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>
> On Sat, Jan 20, 2024 at 6:57 AM Zunbeltz Izaola <
> textnik.typesetting at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Paulo,
>>
>> What is the Knuth-Plass algorithm that InDesign was trying to do? or the
>> hz (Herman Zapf) algorithm that implies the scaling of glyphs?
>>
>
> That I do not know, with this level of precision. The guys working on the
> implementation came to Berkeley
> frequently to learn about Knuth--Plass and to compare outputs with TeX and
> with old manuscripts, but they
> would not talk much about what they were doing. We always assumed they
> couldn't talk.... and they probably
> were very busy transforming the code of the old application and
> the competition of Aldus and QuarkXpress.
>
> Then by mid-2000 when TeX started to be able to use any kind of font and
> {microtype} appeared, I remember
> it was a real blow for them.
>
> Every year Adobe would put out a new version of the tools and as soon as I
> got my copy, I would go for my
> standard text to see how things changed. And indeed, they would change
> every year, sometime for better
> sometimes for worse, and it is hard to recognize Knuth--Plass in them
> right now.
>
>
> According to wikipedia it is not known if InDesign uses the algorithm.
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hz-program
>> but this resource
>> https://www.typografi.org/justering/gut_hz/gutenberg_hz_english.html
>> says it is part of the composition algorithm.
>>
>
>
> Interesting how information is hard to come by.
>
> Paulo Ney
>
>
>
>
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>>> > implementing Knuth-Plass in Adobe InDesign.
>>>>
>>>>   I'm curious about this. Is this coming from your experience as an
>>>> InDesign user (like, getting unsatisfactory results) or from some
>>>> technical information that you have about their implementation? In what
>>>> way is it failing?
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Both. Some 15 years ago I was in touch with the group tasked, but
>>> information was tightly controlled back then and much more now.
>>>
>>> I have followed every release since then and the results varied
>>> tremendously from release to release and right now it seems they removed
>>> everything and are using some in-house developed algorithm -- which has
>>> awful results.
>>>
>>> Paulo Ney
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Zunbeltz Izaola
>> TeXtnik typesetting
>>
>
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