[Scribus] On extra space [bug 424]

[Terry Hancock]

On Wednesday 28 April 2004 07:10 pm, John Culleton wrote:
> This kind of refinement is probably beyond Scribus as 
> presently conceived. But Scribus could take a page out of 
> the InDesign program and copy the TeX paragraph formatting 
> routines in their entirety. They are legally copyable. 

That would be pretty interesting.  I think in an ideal world,
the text rendering engine would be pluggable, and TeX would
be one of the options.  A lot of thought went into TeX's
typesetting engine, and it seems a shame to ignore that. Scribus
is, with apologies, very primitive about typesetting, and
that's really too bad.  Repeating all that work, though, seems
wasteful.  It'd be better to copy use an existing typesetting
engine, and TeX is widely regarded as the best.
 
> TeX is written in a language called Web so the routines 
> would need to be transliterated into whatever Scribus is 
> written in (C++?) This would be a big undertaking but with 
> big payoff. 

I'm not sure it'd be as hard as you think.  My understanding
is that "web" isn't really a "language", but a "literate programming"
system -- I believe you can automatically generate C source
code from it.  Of course, I haven't ever tried, so take that
with a little grain of salt. I bet it's worth investigating,
though.

There are other typesetting engines, of course, such as those
used in Gecko (Mozilla) to render HTML.  That's why I think
maybe a pluggable system would be ideal -- that way, you could
use various source formats for the text, rather than being
limited to plain text.

Cheers,
Terry

--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com