Re: neatroff for Russian. (Was: Questions concerning hyphenation patterns for non-Latin languages, e.g. Russian)

[Dave Kemper]

On 4/26/23, G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> It would probably be a good idea to represent Unicode strings internally
> using char32_t as a base type anyway, but groff's design under the Unix
> filter model described above makes the choice less dramatic in terms of
> increased space consumption than it would otherwise be.

But to keep scalability in mind, this design shouldn't be assumed to
be immutable.  Implementing the Knuth-Plass (or some other)
paragraph-at-once algorithm would greatly expand the amount of input
groff has to remember at once, and a theoretical future
chapter-at-once algorithm (to, for example, optimize page layouts to
eliminate widows) vastly expands it beyond that.

It's possible memory is too cheap to worry about even the worst case,
where groff 4.38 has to hold an entire document in memory (maybe to
finally allow it to put the table of contents up front without page
reordering), but it's a question worth considering before making
changes to groff's fundamental data type.