TUGboat 44:2 (2023)
The Communications of the TeX Users Group

Title: Interactive and real-time typesetting for demonstration and experimentation: ETAP

Summary: GUI and programmatic access to algorithms and parameters for line breaking.

Full text of article: publicly available now.

Author: Didier Verna

Publication: TUGboat volume 44, number 2 (2023), pages 242-248

DOI (this page): 10.47397/tb/44-2/tb137verna-realtime
(previous doi - next doi)

Category: Software & Tools

Difficulty: Intermediate Plus

Abstract: We present ETAP, a platform designed to support both demonstration of, and experimentation with digital typesetting, interactively, and in real-time.

ETAP provides a GUI which currently focuses on all aspects involved in paragraph formatting. A number of pre-processing features can be switched on or off (hyphenation, kerning, ligaturing, etc.). A specific paragraph formatting scheme may be selected from a pool of ready-made algorithms, and adding new algorithms to that pool is easy. Each algorithm comes with its own set of configuration parameters, and the GUI allows you to tweak those parameters and observe the effects in real-time.

ETAP may also be used without, or in parallel with the GUI. While the application is running, the whole programmatic infrastructure is manipulable from a command-line interface. This allows inspection of the various typesetting objects normally displayed by the GUI, and also to perform computations with them, for example, data collection and statistical measurements.

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