Distribution of Q-Q gaps in paragraphs

[Jorge_Stolfi]

It is just a consequence of irregular positional preferences. Spline transform of the line positions of words starting  q in quires 13 and 20 are given by

Thanks, but those are positions along each lines, right?  So those stats are dominated by the starts of body lines.  My stats above are essentially looking only at the head lines of parags.

And I would say that the positional distribution of q-tokens along a parag is a consequence of the meaning of individual q-words and of the semantic structure of parags.  Not the other way around...

And the frequencies of glyphs and digraphs are a consequence of the frequencies of words.  Not the other way around.  (Statistics of glyphs and digraphs are like statistics of animals classified by their colors.  They can be meaningful in some very specific situations, but otherwise they are lumping bears with beavers and bats...)

And let me insist that the anomalous frequency of q-words (or any words) at the start and end of lines may be a consequence of the line-breaking algorithm, that is more likely to break a line before a long word than a short one.  This effect is counter-intuitive but very real, and affects all glyph, digraph, and word statistics at both ends of the lines. Thus any study that claims to show "LAAFU effects"  should check how much of those effects can be attributed to this line-breaking bias.  (For instance, by piping the words of each parag through the trivial line-breaking algorithm with a 20% larger or smaller max line length, and observing how much impact this reformatting has on those "LAAFU effects".)

All the best, --stolfi