Page Makeup by Postprocessing Text Formatter Output

Automatic text formatters usually produce poor page layouts: pages may have different lengths, widow lines abound, and figure placement is hard to control and often wrong. This paper describes a different approach to page makeup. \We add to the output of a text formatter extra information that tells how various elements of the document should appear on the page. A postprocessor uses this information to make all pages the same height, prevent the creation of widow and orphan lines, place footnotes, and float figures to a suitable posi tion on an appropriate page. V/e have implemented such a postprocessor for text processed by the TROFF text formatter. The current version handles these page-makeup tasks for oneand two-column text. Versions of the program have been used to produce camera-ready copy for at least six books and several journal articles. The authors typeset this paper using the software it