If I may chime in... On Fri May 8, 2026 at 9:44 AM CEST, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > At 2026-05-08T04:20:46-0300, Sebastien Peterson-Boudreau wrote: > > Recently, while writing a document, I noticed that groff hyphenated > > the last word of the last line of a paragraph. This looked very ugly, > > so I inserted a \% before the word to prevent it, but that made me > > realize this left a runt at the end of the paragraph. I was wondering: > > is this intentional by the hyphenation algorithm? > > Yes. There's no mechanism in any troff any I know of that penalizes or > assigns a score to this outcome. [...]
Actually, Heirloom troff has `hypp` which allows assigning a penalty to hyphenating the last word of a paragraph. neatroff has `pmll` which allows setting the desired minimal line length of a paragraph (in % of the line length) and an associated penalty for lines which are shorter. This can be used to avoid too short last line of a paragraph, such as one consisting of only a single word. All of the above works only when formatting of entire paragraphs is enabled, as noted below. > [...] *roffs are designed around the principle of > formatting one output line, delivering it to the output device, and then > forgetting about it utterly. [...] As has already been noted, Heirloom troff _and also_ neatroff implement formatting of entire paragraphs. For backwards compatibility reasons this is not the default, but has to be manually enabled by prefixing the desired `ad` mode by `p` (e.g. `ad b` -> `ad pb`). Cheers, onf PS: I am not subscribed to the list. Please Cc me when replying.
