A consideration on an optimal partition of a paragraph into lines for desktop publishing

摘要

Due to the remarkable progress of desk top publishing techniques, many documents are produced by word-processors or typesetting softwares such as TEX. However, almost all such programs use criteria based on English documents in partitioning paragraph into lines, so that they sometimes produce inappropriate typesetting for a Japanese document. For example, if each line is short and a paragraph contains a long mathematical equation or foreign word which cannot be divided by hyphenation, a line with large space between characters may be created, which is not suitable to Japanese documents, since the numbers of characters in succeeding lines are to be almost equal in Japanese documents. In this paper, we consider a problem to break a paragraph into lines, and proposes appropriate criteria to Japanese document. The criteria are effective but simple so that the problem can be solved by a shortest path in a acyclic graph.