> often Tex just failed and overset lines. Yes, TeX's curious policy of doing something terribly if it can't be done well has led me to turn on \sloppy mode by default, because "sloppy" is better than wrong.
Which brings me to another probable quibble with Knuth- Plass. The "simple optimal text formatter" fmt claims to use a variant of Knuth-Plass on equal-width fonts. Often, the peculiar rules of a length "goal" distinct from the length bound result in a paragraph that looks worse than the simple greedy fill that nroff employs. Moreover, with an "optimal" width being chosen for each paragraph separately, you get pages where the line-length appears to vary by paragraph. Is the annoying behavior of fmt an artifact of its variant of Knuth-Plass, or does TeX behave equally capriciously on constant-width unjustified text? Doug
