The LaTeX source may be easily edited to impart any size/proportion desired --- not quite as straight-forward as re-sizing a browser window, but the same ultimate effect.
Not really. It's fixed at "compile time". Eg "A4" or "Letter". I guess it "changes" according to zoom level, but that's just enlarging or shrinking - no reflow required.
How long does a fast latex renderer take on a large document? It's been a few years since I worked with latex, but it's on the order of multiple seconds, right?
The Knuth-Plass line-breaking algorithm is applied per paragraph; performance is typically not going to be an issue at all.
If you apply it to all paragraphs, yes, you will get pathological performance on some extreme cases—the algorithm is quadratic, if I recall correctly. But there’s nothing preventing you from trying to apply it in general, and giving up if the input is too long. So your five or ten line paragraphs get KP, and longer paragraphs get greedy.
There is absolutely nothing stopping browsers from applying Knuth-Plass. In fact, Firefox has had a bug about implementing it for 14 years <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=630181>, and there’s some useful discussion of things there. And CSS itself is finally actually going ahead with `text-wrap: pretty`, which encourages such things. Long ago, IE apparently even had it via `text-justify: newspaper` <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5189258>.
All the print books on my bookshelf use fully justified text. In contrast, my preference for ebooks are to render them as left-justified. So I think I intuitively arrived at a practice that matches your conclusion about justified text in browsers.
Its the combination of disappointment that it wasn't merged and that it took several months to get back on a significant contribution (whilst adding their own version into their enterprise offering in the meantime). Of course there's going to be some emotions, and rightfully so.
Remember when for a while Azul tried to sell custom CPUs to support features in their JVM (e.g. some garbage collector features that required hardware interrupts and some other extra instructions). Although they dropped it pretty quickly in favor of just working on software
https://www.ludlowinstitute.org/articles/what-i-wish-i-knew-...