[Scribus] Problem with line breaks

[Randolph Bentson]

On Fri, Aug 08, 2003 at 12:43:13AM +0100, Alastair Robinson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > It seems that the linespacing isn't changed when you change font size,
> > But you can change it manually.
> > Use  Tools -> Show Measurements
> 
> Yes, this is something that needs to be fixed, because it slows down and 
> frustrates the user.  As I see it there are several options:
> 
> 1 - have Scribus automatically increase the line spacing when the font
> size is  changed, preserving the difference between the two.
> 
> 2 - like 1, except Scribus would preserve the ratio between the two.
> 
> 3 - make the linespacing widget accept absolute spacing, as it does now,
> or  relative spacing (e.g. +2pt, or maybe even +5%) 
> 
> The third would be my preferred option, since it allows the current behaviour 
> to remain for those that want it - but what does everyone else think?

Careful of what you ask for, there are consequences.

In the 0.9.7 implementation the line spacing is defined for the
entire text box (PAGEOBJECT).  It appears to be derived from the
first text put in the box.  If each change to font size resulted
in a corresponding change to line spacing, the lines of the entire
text box will open up and close together as a function of the last
font size used.  If one could explicitly change the line spacing
for the text box, one could adjust for the worst case after all
the lines of text have been established.  This would give the user
better control, but in either case, the "all lines in the text box
are equally spaced" means one will get lines of small text that are
too far apart or lines of large text which are too close together.

Perhaps qt has the ability to advance lines as a function of the
largest font in a line.  If this is so, it would be a simple matter
to specify the line spacing for the whole text box as percentage of
largest font rather than some absolute size in points/mm/inches
and let qt do the work.  But if qt doesn't have this ability,
the job becomes much harder.

I've considered writing a general purpose script to pack a number of
text boxes, each with text of only one font size, but it doesn't
appear that one can get size requirements for a block of text
back out of qt and into scripts.  That means there's no basis for
adjusting text box sizes.  (Truth to be told, I was able to fake this
because there wasn't a lot of text in my special case, but if there's
a lot of text, one cannot trivially determine the effects of variable
character sizes and all that follows.)

-- 
Randolph Bentson
bentson at holmsjoen.com
-- 
Randolph Bentson
bentson at holmsjoen.com