The context is that I'd like to not have to manually choose newlines and rather eyeball the length of text and possibly specify the number of lines or horizontal width the text should take up. I'm interested in various alignment types (left, center, possibly right).
I realize this is a bit of a complex question because I'm not really sure what looks best in terms of different breaks. Take left alignment and the following sentence: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Here are a few possibilities:
1:
The quick brown fox
jumps over
the lazy dog.
2:
The quick
brown fox jumps over
the lazy dog.
3:
The quick
brown fox
jumps over the lazy dog.
4:
The quick
brown fox jumps
over the lazy dog.
For left alignment, I personally think a "towers of hanoi" stacking looks best (e.g. #4), but I'm not sure if it makes sense for center alignment.
Other considerations may be punctuation in the text.
An acceptable answer to this question may very well be: this is a bad idea or very difficult. Alternatively, I can see it being something done with an external scripting language (which I haven't really gotten in to yet). I'm really just curious if there is an existing method for this, as it is currently not a necessity for me.
Here is a more precise example dealing with author addresses and titles:
\documentclass[letterpaper]{article}
\usepackage[affil-it]{authblk}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage{blindtext}
\title{An efficient method for exploiting midichlorians in weak life-forms}
\author[1,2]{Darth Vader}%
\author[2,3]{Darth Sidious%
\thanks{Electronic address: \texttt{palpatine@empire.gove}; Corresponding author}}
\affil[1]{Office of the Supreme Commander of the Imperial Foces, The Galactic Empire, The Bridge, Executor}
\affil[2]{Order of the Sith Lords, LiMerge Power Building, The Works, Coruscant}
\affil[3]{Office of the Emperor of the Galaxy, The Galactic Empire, 1000 Imperial Palace, 2 Main St. Coruscant}
\date{\today}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
I ran out of creative energy here ... \blindtext
\end{document}
This results in the following:
The title itself is a bit unbalanced, and the second author affiliation has only one word on the second line.
\nolinebreak
penalties can be set between different words of a sentence in order to force LaTeX to make certain breaks less preferable. An example:The\nolinebreak[1] quick brown\nolinebreak[2] fox jumps over the lazy\nolinebreak[1] dog.
would penalize line breaking at various points, after the leading "The", between "brown" and "fox", and between "lazy" and "dog".