[Scribus] Linespacing issues

[clayborne.arevalo at gmail.com]

On Wed, Dec 13, 2006 at 11:46:18PM +0200, Riku Leino wrote:
> Clayborne Arevalo wrote:
> > I think the way Scribus handles linespacing isn't optimal for
> > multi-column layouts.
> >
> > For example, let's say I create a line with 12pt text at 36pt
> > linespacing. If the line is the first line in the text box,
> > Scribus will ignore the huge linespacing I specified for the
> > text (36pt) and instead use the height of the text as linespacing
> > (12pt). Scribus will only honor the linespacing if it's not on
> > the first line of the text box.
> >
> > This makes it difficult to align multi-column layouts.
> >
> > Imagine the following scenario: I have a "Section Head" style
> > with 14pt text at 24pt linespacing. For my "Normal Text" style I
> > have 10pt text at 12pt linespacing. If Scribus honors my 24pt and
> > 12pt linespacing everywhere it occurs, then I will have not much
> > trouble aligning my text, since obviously:
> >
> > 12pt x 2 = 24pt.
> >
> > However, with Scribus's current behavior of ignoring linespacing at
> > the top, I have to manually reposition the text box if I want my
> > columns to finish evenly at the bottom since the first line will
> > have a linespacing of 14pt rather than 12pt.
> 
> You could attach your lines to the baseline and forget manual tweaking.

How could I do this?

There were two recent instances where I had to work around Scribus's
linespacing behavior. First was while trying to typeset a "fancy"
section head. The section heads are all in lowercase. And so the
linespacing for "venus" was markedly different from the linespacing
for "earth" (because of the ascender "t" and "h").

Second was when trying to automatically start the title of a chapter at
a certain offset from the top margin. I could think of two workarounds
-- inserting blank lines and dragging the text box down to a lower
position. But these were far from optimal.

So yes, I do need to find a way to get consistent or "fixed"
linespacing everywhere in the document.

BTW I noticed a difference in linespacing behavior between 1.3.3 and
1.3.4.