The depth of every position, under four caps

The depth of every position, under four caps

A collection of 8 copies of 256 characters. Each line is the copy depth of every position under one cap — the number of phrases that have to be followed to produce the character there. Without a cap the depth climbs one step per copy and reaches 12; under a cap it is a ceiling with the same shape underneath it, because the parse takes the longest match it is allowed and the positions that were shallow stay shallow. Sampled every 4 characters.

Drawn at 700 × 420, wide on the page. Everything above is what cap-structure returns with no arguments; the caption is the generator's own, computed from the numbers in the drawing rather than written beside it.

6 essays call cap-structure. The drawing above is what it returns with no arguments at all; every call below passes it something, because a placement that passes nothing draws whichever member of the family the generator happens to default to rather than the one its essay argues about — which is what optcheck and figfill exist to catch.