[scribus] Optical margins in 1.3.5svn - H&J blues

[Tornóci László]

Magyar Bálint wrote:
> On Sat, 2008-08-02 at 16:28 +0200, Tornóci László wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I cannot make optical margins to work. Here's what I did:
>> I've written about 20 pages in oowriter, imported it into 1.3.3.12, made 
>> a nice 3 column layout there. Then I imported the .sla file to 1.3.5svn. 
>> (Because it is supposed to have better hyphenation/justification 
>> capabilities. Importing the oo odt file directly to 1.3.5 didn't work 
>> well to me, that's why imported it first to 1.3.3.12.). In the text box 
>> properties, 'advanced settings', I set word tracking min: 65%, norm: 
>> 100%, Glyph extension min: 97%, max: 103%. In 'distance of text' I set 
>> 'Optical margins' to 'Default' (that's the only option besides 'None'). 
>> After getting the text hyphenated, the result is quite acceptable, 
>> except the margins. They look absolutely straight to me, not like 
>> optical margins should be (hyphens sticking out somewhat).
> 
> Éppen ez az optikai margó lényege! Úgy igazítja a szóközöket és a
> karakterek méreteit, hogy a jobb- és balszélek egységesen simák
> legyenek. A kötőjellel végződő sorokat is éppen annyival szedi
> szélesebbre, hogy a függőleges ne törjön meg. Viszont nem keverendő a
> "lógó" írásjelekkel (angolul hanging punctuation); ezt egyelőre csak
> manuálisan tudod elérni.

Azt hiszem mindketten tudjuk, hogy mi az optikai margó, csak mindketten 
félreérthetően fogalmaztunk. A lényeg, hogy ha megnézed ezt:

http://aqua.scribus.net/hz-scribus.pdf
linked from: http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Better_Justification_in_1.3.4

a bal oszlop klasszikus, a jobb optikai margóval, akkor én csak a bal 
oldalit tudtam produkálni a fenti beállítások ellenére.
Ja és köszi az inkscape tippet, amit a múltkor adtál!

Ok, for those of you, who might not speak Hungarian :-) and could not 
follow my discussion with Bálint, about what optical margins are:
there is a nice example in the pdf linked above (left column "normal" 
justification, right one with "optical margins").

However, after experimenting further with 1.3.5svn, my biggest problems 
are not that I cannot get optical margins, but the fact, that after all 
my 17 pages of linked text gets loaded there is _no way_ to use the 
story editor, it gets so slow. And putting a hyphen here and there 
manually seems to be the only way to improve automatic 
hyphenation/justification.

The problem is, that the H&J rules in scribus are still too dumb (even 
in 1.3.5svn): if two hyphenations take place in two subsequent rows (and 
the max allowed is set to 2) then the next line will not get hyphenated, 
even if it causes absolutely unacceptable wide interword spaces. In 
these cases you could often improve the situation by _not_ doing one of 
the first two hyphenations. Obviously scribus decides about  H&J line by 
line, not reconsidering decisions already made. I wouldn't mind doing it 
manually, but there is no way to undo an automatic hyphenation (maybe to 
put the appropriate word into the ignore list in 1.3.5svn). Any hope for 
paragraph based H&J rules in future versions of scribus? Maybe a 
switchable option for this if speed is a problem? Any hope to be able to 
override H&J rules?

Is there a way to make the story editor more responsive in 1.3.5svn? If 
not, I'll stay with 1.3.3.12 for H&J. It is not as nice, not as compact, 
but at least I can tweak it a bit manually, by hard-hyphens, so I can 
get a more even-looking result. With 1.3.5svn, most of the lines are 
nicer, but some lines are absolutely ugly, and there is no way to fix it.

					Yours: Laszlo