There is some interesting discussion on the LaTeX stack overflow page about the challenge of detecting and preventing rivers during the typesetting process:
Avoiding rivers becomes a rather non-trivial optimization problem. In Holkner's paper he found that it took ~1 minute just to typeset 1200 words. Some of his experiments took more than six hours to complete.
rendall 3 days ago [-]
Futility Closet had a cheerful, wholesome podcast for many years until abruptly ending it without much explanation. Glad to see they're still busy. Anyone know what happened? I always wondered.
JKCalhoun 3 days ago [-]
I was under the impression they simply wanted to take a break. I thought the break was to be more permanent... but perhaps they found they couldn't quit it.
rendall 2 days ago [-]
They said in their penultimate podcast episode (2021-11-22) that the Futility Closet blog would continue but that the following episode would be their last.
antognini 3 days ago [-]
I'm just impressed that the website is still around and they are adding new items. They've been going for more than twenty years at this point!
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/4507/avoiding-rivers...
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/29049/how-to-define-...
And if you really want to get into it, there is a rather detailed paper by Alex Holkner: https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/tex/2006-holkner.pdf
Avoiding rivers becomes a rather non-trivial optimization problem. In Holkner's paper he found that it took ~1 minute just to typeset 1200 words. Some of his experiments took more than six hours to complete.
https://webkit.org/blog/16547/better-typography-with-text-wr...
In this case the edges of the river represent DNA base pairs: A on one side has always a T in front of it; the same with C and G.
...
> (squint to see it)
This seems rather contradictory?