This paper proposes a new specification of pretty printing which is stronger than the state of the art: we require the output to be the shortest possible, and we also offer the ability to align sub-documents at will. We argue that our specification precludes a greedy implementation. Yet, we provide an implementation which behaves linearly in the size of the output. The derivation of the implementation demonstrates functional programming methodology.

@article{Bernardy17,
  title = {A pretty but not greedy printer (functional pearl)},
  author = {Jean-Philippe Bernardy},
  journal = {Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages},
  volume = {1},
  number = {ICFP},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.1145/3110250}
}