A method and computer-readable medium are provided for optimized paragraph layout. According to the method, a line-by-line paragraph layout is generated determine a maximum penalty for a paragraph. One or more layout nodes may be generated that include data representing a possible layout of the paragraph to a point within a backing store and identifying any changes to a geometry of the page caused by the layout of the paragraph defined by the layout node. A penalty is also calculated for each of the layout nodes. Each layout node that has a penalty less than the maximum penalty calculated during the line-by-line formatting processing is added to the node pool. This process repeats until only a single layout node remains in the node pool that represents the entire paragraph of text.