Weighted prefix normal words: mind the gap (Q832931)

The authors discuss possible generalizations to larger alphabets of the notion of prefix normal words defined by \textit{G. Fici} and \textit{Z. Lipták} [Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 6795, 228--238 (2011; Zbl 1221.68128)] as words whose prefixes contain at least as many 1s as any of their factors of the same length. The suggestion is to assign to each letter of the alphabet its weight and to consider, instead of the number of ones, the weight function defined either as the sum or the product of weights of letters. The situations can be predictably different and rather complicated depending on the details of the definition of the weight function. As is announced in the paper, the properties of the weight function are nicer when it is \textit{gapfree}. For the entire collection see [Zbl 1482.68035].