Is there a standard for automatic line-breaking for text with various alignment types?

Question

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.

Answer 1

Your question isn't very clear and lacks an example document, but this shows four different setting of teh text, standard justified, sloppy, ragged right and RaggedRight from the ragged2e package. As the text is so short it doesn't really show the differences well so I repeat the settings with a longer paragraph with the text repeated. It still doesn't really show the differences a major difference is the amount of hyphenation that is allowed, but these are short non-hyphenatable words.

Unless you are setting poetry where choice of linebreaking is part of the composition of the works and you want manual control over that, it should be rather rare to manually linebreak text at all when using TeX. So the initial line of your question seems strange with no additional context explaining why manual linebreaking is needed.

\documentclass{article}

\newcommand\qbf{The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. }
\newcommand\qbff{\qbf\qbf\qbf\qbf}
\usepackage{ragged2e}

\begin{document}

\begin{minipage}[t]{3cm}\qbf\end{minipage}
\quad
\begin{minipage}[t]{3cm}\sloppy\qbf\end{minipage}

\bigskip
\begin{minipage}[t]{3cm}\raggedright\qbf\end{minipage}
\quad
\begin{minipage}[t]{3cm}\RaggedRight\qbf\end{minipage}

\bigskip\hrule\bigskip

\begin{minipage}[t]{3cm}\qbff\end{minipage}
\quad
\begin{minipage}[t]{3cm}\sloppy\qbff\end{minipage}

\bigskip
\begin{minipage}[t]{3cm}\raggedright\qbff\end{minipage}
\quad
\begin{minipage}[t]{3cm}\RaggedRight\qbff\end{minipage}

\end{document}



\documentclass{article}

\newcommand\qbf{The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. }
\newcommand\qbff{\qbf\qbf\qbf\qbf}
\usepackage{ragged2e}

\begin{document}

\begin{minipage}[t]{3cm}\qbf\end{minipage}
\quad
\begin{minipage}[t]{3cm}\sloppy\qbf\end{minipage}

\bigskip
\begin{minipage}[t]{3cm}\raggedright\qbf\end{minipage}
\quad
\begin{minipage}[t]{3cm}\RaggedRight\qbf\end{minipage}

\bigskip\hrule\bigskip

\begin{minipage}[t]{3cm}\qbff\end{minipage}
\quad
\begin{minipage}[t]{3cm}\sloppy\qbff\end{minipage}

\bigskip
\begin{minipage}[t]{3cm}\raggedright\qbff\end{minipage}
\quad
\begin{minipage}[t]{3cm}\RaggedRight\qbff\end{minipage}

\end{document}

---

With the now supplied MWE, you can get various effects depending on how you set the paragraph parameters. The (very old:-) package you are using doesn't give an interface to that but basically it just redefines tabular used by the article package \maketitle to be center, so by redefining center you can cause various texts to move around, for example:

\documentclass[letterpaper]{article}
\usepackage[affil-it]{authblk}
\usepackage{ragged2e}
\makeatletter
\def\maketitle
  {{\@flushglue=.25\textwidth minus.25\textwidth\z@skip
    \hyphenpenalty\@M
    \let\old@date\@date
    \def\@date{\mbox{}\hskip\@flushglue\old@date\hskip\@flushglue\mbox{}\par}%hmm
    \renewenvironment{tabular}[2][]{\par}
                                   {\par}%
  \AB@maketitle}}

\makeatother
\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

\noindent X\dotfill X

I ran out of creative energy here ... \blindtext
\end{document}

Having said that, addresses, like my original comment about poetry, are really a special case where there are many social conventions about linebreaking. It's not unlikely that you end up having to specify linebreaks by hand in an address.