RE: [css-text-4] text-wrap:balance

>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:

The original intent of this feature with markup such as:

<h1>foo foo foo foo foo foo foo foo foo</h1>

is to prevent rendering to have an "orphan" (for lack of better terminology) or 2 on the last line like:

foo foo foo foo foo foo foo foo
foo

and instead be rendered in a more balanced way something like:

foo foo foo foo foo
foo foo foo foo

There is no intent to change the number of lines to attempt to achieve some "perfect" rendering such as:

foo foo foo
foo foo foo
foo foo foo

This would be computationally intensive and I'm not sure it is even desired.


Back to the example which prompted your reply:

>>> 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.

Yes, considering average line length across multiple blocks can yield silly results. I don't think it should be done.

This is minimally useful for a single block of text, so I don't see what would be expected across multiple blocks of text. Does anyone really want it? Who's pushing back? What's the use case? The only possible case I can think of is maybe poetry, and poets usually have an *exact* form in mind so I don't think this will be of use in that scenario.

Randy

Received on Monday, 26 January 2015 17:02:04 UTC