But surely the effect is unavoidable when one too many letters, at maximum "compression", pushes a large word off the top line of a paragraph. No program can fix this, other than changing the margins, or fonts, of an entire book for ONE word... Surely the editor can later make a note to the author, at the request of the typesetter maybe, among all the other suggested changes, if books take years to reach the market...
The writer's words take precedence over typesetting.
And a good typesetter can work miracles.
My point is that bad cases require human intervention. It cannot be automatic. Also, I have seen trade publications with such odd lines that are quite extreme (even if rare) so it does slip through, or is at least occasionally tolerated, even in professional publications.n
It is the job of the typesetter to intervene. That's what they do. That's why, for instance, some self-publishers hire a professional to typeset their printed books.
Sometimes, it's true, that there's not much you can do as a typesetter to fix a problem. Given that one page flows to the next, sometimes you can't fix an issue without introducing a larger issue, so the lesser problem is tolerated.
Sometimes the typesetter is less than competent, but that's not likely at a respected trade publisher.
Generally though, a professional typesetter works magic by making tiny changes in kerning and tracking, or glyph use (for instance, there are multiple forms of ellipses in a professional full font).
That said, I'm not sure, really, what you're after other than making strange accusations and assertions about publishers, writers and editors.
