Heuristic for the Line Division Problem in Computer Justified Text

Abstract

Measures for evaluating solutions to the line division problem in computer justified text are presented. They are based on the belief that documents tend to have a more pleasing visual appearance when the deviation between interword breaks in a paragraph is reduced. This effect is achieved by not placing the maximum number of words on each line. The measures are variations on the variance of the number of extra spaces per interword break in a paragraph. They are applicable to both fixed and variable width fonts. One of the measures is examined in greater detail. It has the property that a lower bound can be computed, thereby indicating when further rearrangement of the text is futile. Several text rearrangement algorithms are proposed that make use of this measure. © 1982, ACM. All rights reserved.