Breakers is an XTension for QuarkXPress® that optimizes, smooths, and improves the appearance of XPress publications.

Breakers does one thing only --- it considers every line-break, every possible choice of where to break each line so as to make the best possible choices for every paragraph as a whole. Breakers tries to open up tight lines, to move words into loose lines, and to remove hyphens wherever possible. If Breakers sees a line with big holes of white space, it looks above and below to see if the overall appearance can be improved. (Breakers is able to improve most paragraphs.)

Breakers is the polish, the finishing touch; you use it after the copy and the design and the layout are done. It's push-button easy; just choose "Break" from the Breakers menu, and Breakers will scan every line break and choose better ones if at all possible.

Once Breakers has done its work, the copy is "set"; if you find it necessary to make more copy changes, just tell Breakers to "Unbreak" that column to release it, then edit as usual.

Let's consider first how a person (and most computers) decide where to break running text into lines of copy. Imagine an old-fashioned typewriter, where the bell rings as you're approaching the right margin. When you hear the bell, you decide what to do: break at the end of the current word, insert a hyphen immediately, or type another word or two if they'll fit within the margins. Then, you return the carriage and go on to begin the same process with the next line, and you forget everything about the line just ended.

Breakers simply doesn't forget. It remembers all of the possible breaks for that line, and then it considers all of the possible next lines for each of those possible breaks, and then all of the possible breaks for the next line after that, and so on. Breakers considers the full network of all possible breaks for every line in the paragraph, often considering more than a million possibilities for a typical paragraph. When Breakers comes to a line that just can't be made to fit well, It can look backwards to find better breaks. If a better possibility exists, Breakers will find it.

How does Breakers know the score? How does it tell a bad break from a better one? Breakers starts from the type designer's information as to the desired spacing, and subtracts demerits for break points that require stretching the line, or compressing the line, or inserting a hyphen. It also subtracts for visual imbalance, for a tight line next to a loose one, and subtracts more for two or more hyphens in a row. Every path through the network of breaks is scored, and the path with the best overall score is chosen, choosing simultaneously all of the breakpoints for the entire paragraph.

Breakers technology is derived from the optimum line-breaking algorithm invented by Professor Donald Knuth and Michael Plass of Stanford University, as part of the TeX programmable typesetting system which is the core technology of Textures by Blue Sky TeX Systems.

©2000 Blue Sky TeX Systems