Where a 8-pattern Commentz-Walter run looked, over 20,000 characters

Where a 8-pattern Commentz-Walter run looked, over 20,000 characters

Each cell is 10 consecutive text positions and its shade is the fraction of them the matcher ever read. Over the whole 20,000-character text it read 12,314 distinct positions — 61.6% — and made 22,153 examinations, because its windows overlap. Aho-Corasick on the same text reads every position exactly once and would fill this strip solid. The unread cells are the algorithm's claim: no occurrence of any of the 8 patterns begins in them, and nothing in the text was consulted to establish it.

Drawn at 700 × 256, wide on the page. Everything above is what skip-profile returns with no arguments; the caption is the generator's own, computed from the numbers in the drawing rather than written beside it.

2 essays call skip-profile. 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.