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

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.