What each rule reads, as the pattern set grows

What each rule reads, as the pattern set grows

Characters examined in 20,000 characters of four symbols, by pattern set size. The bad-character rule alone stops skipping almost at once; the published rules and the exact rules run together, apart at the smallest sets — 1.06x at 2 patterns — and identical from 32 upward. Both axes are logarithmic.

Drawn at 700 × 430, wide on the page. Everything above is what published-shift returns with no arguments; the caption is the generator's own, computed from the numbers in the drawing rather than written beside it.

8 essays call published-shift. 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.