All the time that I’ve been using TEX, I’ve been lucky enough to stumble into a solution just in time to save my day (or some project). In most cases it involved starting from scratch with the strong belief that TEX can do everything. After a while you reach a state where you can predict if something can be done or not. An extreme example of operating on the edge is backgrounds that span paragraphs and pages, adapt to paragraph characteristics, and can be nested. Another mechanism that made some projects possible was HTML-like table building. Imagine combining these two mechanisms.