[Scribus] Examples

[John Culleton]

On Wednesday 10 September 2003 11:39, Steve Herrick wrote:
> Peter Linnell wrote:
> > Scribus does hyphenation and quite well in IMO. There are several
> > languages supported besides English. The code is similar to the
> > code in Open Office, which is based on the code from Latex.
>
LaTeX uses the TeX typesetting engine, and that program evaluates an 
entire paragraph at a time before making hyphenation and line breaking 
diecisions. I know that InDesign has "borrowed" the (open source) TeX 
paragraph making routines, but I would be surprised to find that Open 
Office had also done so. Are you sure about this?
> In general, the hyphenation is pretty good. Once in a while, however,
> I find it doing odd things, like breaking at the last letter
> ("letter-s"). Has anyone else seen this?

Well, not in TeX :-). To be fair Scribus is competing more against Quark 
than TeX as far as I can tell.  No one is touting Scribus at this point 
for academic texts with lots of formulas.  However I was disturbed to 
see the poor paragraphing and no hyphenation in the one page sample 
mentioned before, hence my question.  Other samples are much better I 
have since discovered. 

But it is a fairly simple matter to put in the hyphenation routine that 
the first part must be at least 2 characters long and the last part at 
least 3 characters long. If Scribus hasn't gotten at least that far 
then its hyphenation has no discernable relationship to the TeX 
routines, and it does need some work.   

Oh, yes. TeX also supports non-English languages, including some 
Oriental ones.  So that is a shared capability. What TeX doesn't do is 
handle the newspaper style layout with any facility. That is why I am 
struggling to learn Scribus.  

-- 
John Culleton
Able Indexers and Typesetters
http://wexfordpress.com



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