- From: Florian Rivoal <florian@rivoal.net>
- Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 00:02:24 +0100
- To: fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net>
- Cc: www-style@w3.org
> On 25 Jan 2015, at 22:50, fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net> wrote: > > On 01/20/2015 04:18 PM, Alan Stearns wrote: >> >> I hemmed and hawed a bit about adding another stipulation - lines only >> balance *if* doing so does not change the number of lines. So a single >> paragraph of: >> >> Foo foo foo >> foo foo foo >> foo foo. >> >> Would not change to: >> >> Foo foo >> foo foo >> foo foo >> foo foo. >> >> >> Even though that gets you the best balancing result. For headlines and >> captions, I think this is what’s usually intended (balance the lines, but >> not if that makes an additional line). But I’ve heard some pushback on >> this idea. > > I think we do need to require that. Otherwise > > Foo foo > fooo fooo > foo foo. > > would end up balancing as > > Foo > foo > fooo > fooo > foo > foo. > > Which is clearly silly. I am not necessarily opposed to a restriction forbidding changing the number of lines (as it would solve the question I raised earlier), but it isn't necessary to prevent what you showed above. What "minimize the deviation from the average line length" means is a bit ambiguous, and different interpretations lead to different results, especially if if the number of lines can change. Minimize the sum of the absolute value of differences from the mean? Minimize the mean of the absolute value of the differences from the mean? Minimize the (population) standard deviation? I'll spare you more variations around this theme you could get at by interpreting "average" as "median" instead of "mean", even though I don't know which leads to better results. Applying this to your example: 1st rendering: - the mean is 7 - total of differences is 2 - mean of differences is 0.67. - std dev is 0.82 2nd rendering - the mean is 3.5 - total of differences is 3 - mean of differences is 0.5 - std dev is 0.5 If we go with total of differences, we'd keep the first rendering even without requiring the number of lines to be constant. In some cases, this definition together with permission to change the number of lines could be an improvement. For example: Fooo foo fooooooo foo fo fo fooooooo becomes Fooo foo fooooooo foo fo fo fooooooo which is better balanced and not silly. The stats here are: mean: 11.33 / sum-diff: 6.67 / mean-diff: 2.22 / std-dev: 2.49 vs mean: 8.25 / sum-diff: 1.5 / mean-diff: 0.38 / std-dev: 0.43 - Florian
Received on Sunday, 25 January 2015 23:02:49 UTC