Re: [Groff] figurate text in groff and TeX

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Doug,

> But my actual question about figurate text was how in Tex (as distinct
> from the Knuth line-breaking paper) would one specify the shape of a
> non-rectangular paragraph, in which line length varies as some
> function of vertical position.

I could be going over old ground here, and my brush with TeX was slight,
but Tex has \parshape that's given N pairs of indent and line length to
describe the first N rendered lines.  I'd guess TeX users that wanted to
specify a function, e.g. of the line number, would write TeX that
calculated those values and then did the \parshape.  (Some use MetaPost
to do the sums.)

http://www.ctan.org/pkg/shapepar, switching the name around, is a macro
package that can handle holes, e.g. the eyes in a skull, but still boils
down to taking a description of the scan lines to be filled for the
shape.

Cheers, Ralph.