[scribus] Kerning redux

[John Jason Jordan]

Some time I asked here about kerning combining diacriticals. It now
occurs to me that there is something wrong with the way Scribus 1.3.5
Rc3 on Jaunty x86_64 does manual kerning.

Try this experiment:

Open a new document and create a text frame. Open the Story Editor and
type a word of half a dozen characters or more. Select two of the
characters in the middle of the word. Apply kerning, say -10%. 

When I do this the two selected letters are kerned closer together, but
the leftmost letter is also kerned leftward into the preceding
non-selected character.

Is this by design? I ask because I can't think of any other program
which kerns non-selected text. Moreover, if this is by design, then
Scribus has no way to kern just two characters; you have to kern at
least three.