Rivers | Hacker News Reader

Rivers

futilitycloset.com

72 pointssurprisetalk8 comments

There is some interesting discussion on the LaTeX stack overflow page about the challenge of detecting and preventing rivers during the typesetting process:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Since Christian Bök’s Xenotext was recently discussed here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43974005), check out “The March of the Nucleotides”: https://x.com/christianbok/status/1064741910948995072

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.

WebKit is addressing this problem.

https://webkit.org/blog/16547/better-typography-with-text-wr...

> Because they’re distracting, these artifacts are generally discouraged

...

> (squint to see it)

This seems rather contradictory?

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