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From: wsinpdb@lso.win.tue.nl (Paul de Bra)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: TeX hypenation
Message-ID: <1250@tuewsd.win.tue.nl>
Date: 14 Jun 90 14:41:14 GMT
References: <1990Jun11.223352.20248@laguna.ccsf.caltech.edu>
Sender: wsinpdb@win.tue.nl (Paul de Bra)
Organization: Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Lines: 15

In article <1990Jun11.223352.20248@laguna.ccsf.caltech.edu> andy@juno.caltech.edu (Andy Fyfe) writes:
>...
>I have a question.  Given that the document is set in a sans-serif font,
>the word "all" appears to be shorter in length than "al-", so why would
>TeX even bother to hyphenate when the result is longer?  In the other
>case, I think the "t" is no wider than the "-" but it's close.  Or is it
>a matter of not worrying about something that couldn't possibly happen?

Contrary to troff and other programs, TeX tries to optimize the spacing in
an entire paragraph. Moving one letter to the next line may improve that
next line. This may explain why TeX chooses to use this hyphenation.


Paul.
(debra@research.att.com)