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Rivers

Rivers

2 comments

·May 16, 2025
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antognini

There is some interesting discussion on the LaTeX stack overflow page about the challenge of detecting and preventing rivers during the typesetting process:

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/4507/avoiding-rivers...

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/29049/how-to-define-...

And if you really want to get into it, there is a rather detailed paper by Alex Holkner: https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/tex/2006-holkner.pdf

Avoiding rivers becomes a rather non-trivial optimization problem. In Holkner's paper he found that it took ~1 minute just to typeset 1200 words. Some of his experiments took more than six hours to complete.

rendall

Futility Closet had a cheerful, wholesome podcast for many years until abruptly ending it without much explanation. Glad to see they're still busy. Anyone know what happened? I always wondered.