hi there

 

  I'm a member of the Institute of Italian culture in Tbilisi

"a non-profit organization focused on coworking, humanism, and social innovation"

 

https://istitutoculturaitaliana.org/

 

and we are trying to adopt the well known and

greatly appreciated by me

linebreak algorithm of Donald Knuth

for our publishing.

 

Since we are focused mainly on the web (i.e. "internet",

not the Knuth's literary language) and since we want

an highly customizable solution, we would like to translate

at least the core functionalities of Tex (or better, the

linebreak in itself with some required features related to it,

like glyphs, nodes, (fonts) and so on), in some internet

script, like specifically php and javascript (especially the

first is not excluded, if I remember correctly, among

the languages you have excluded during the choice of

Lua).

 

Our purpose, however, would be to "atomize" as much

as possible the core features of Tex so to make them

(as possible) easy understandable and, as possible,

usable as "standalone" scripts: this should be true

for the mentioned linebreak but also for the paging

(the positioning of paragraphs along the pages)

itself. As well as of course for the hyphenation

engine.

[to be more precise, our version could be

focused on XML input and XML output, so

to avoid both the markup language of

Tex, and the pdf output, not required in the

use on the web since we want to use HTML5]

 

 

I have take a look at the -- impressive -- work

of Taco Hoekwater, with whom I have exchanged

some messages -- and he directed me to the

Lua version of linebreak of Hans Hagen.

 

Now my question, and my proposal to you

is the following.

 

I'm willing to make such work, which would

be publicly available to you, but I would need

detailed information about how to proceed,

so to avoid wasting time in the less pleasant

task for a programmer: to understand the code

of somebody else.

 

As already stated to Taco, I'm a humanist at

the base, however I think that we are all called

to deal with the technical problems posed by

the every day life.