[scribus] The Scribus target - a question for the developers

[Gregory Pittman]

John Culleton wrote:
> On Thursday 25 September 2008 06:12:52 pm avox wrote:
>   
>> John Culleton-3 wrote:
>>     
>>> On Saturday 20 September 2008 02:16:13 pm avox wrote:
>>>       
>>>> John Culleton-3 wrote:
>>>>         
>>>>> ...
>>>>> And things like hanging punctuation,
>>>>> microtypography and so on are just beyond the reach of Scribus
>>>>> or any similar product.
>>>>>           
>>>> Funny you'd say that, I implemented hanging punctuation and
>>>> glyph extension in 1.3.4. Pierre implemented OTF features in
>>>> FontMatrix and I have a prototype
>>>> of a paragraph layouter for Scribus. And footnotes and
>>>> widow/orphan control are definitely on our todo list. So I
>>>> wouldn't say that's out of our reach.
>>>>         
>>> Interesting. How does one apply hanging punctuation? I have a
>>> recent version of Scribus 1.3.5 up on a Debian partition.
>>>       
>> It's called "optical margins" in Scribus. That moves punctuation
>> 50% - 70% into the margin and also applies a moderate margin
>> kerning at the right margin
>> (usually only visible with 'r' and 'f' characters).
>>
>> I followed the values from pdfTeX for punctuation and re-use the
>> kerning pairs
>> with period for the right side (imagine ending each line with a
>> period, kern the line,
>> than justify the lines such that the periods are aligned, then hide
>> the periods).
>> I couldn't find a similar trick at the left side; all tries looked
>> worse than the
>> version without margin kerning.
>>
>> There was a proposal to attach margin kerning values to the space
>> character, but
>> AFAIK there aren't many fonts which follow that.
>>
>> /Andreas
>>     
>
> Is this part of Scribus 1.3.5 today? Given a text block how do I 
> activate the optical margins? must I do it manually? Is it a value in 
> story editor?
>   
In the Text tab of Properties, click on the Distance of Text sub-tab, 
then choose Default rather than None for Optical Margins. Also, in 
Advanced Settings sub-tab, there are settings for Word Tracking and 
Glyph Extension, which can also help with the appearance of the text on 
the line.

Greg