[scribus] Kerning redux

[John Morris]

   For what it's worth, this ie exactly the opposite of how Adobe 
Illustrator CS works. When I select a single character and and apply 
negative kerning to it, the character to the right of the selected 
character shifts to the right. When I select two characters and apply 
the same kerning, the two characters come closest together, and the 
spacing between the rightmost selected character and the first 
unselected character to the right of the selection also gets smaller.
   I've been using Illustrator for about 20 years now and I believe 
that earlier versions behaved exactly the way Scribus behaves, moving 
the selected character(s) to the left for negative kerning. Unlike in 
Scribus 1.3.5.1 on Mac OS X, in Illustrator, placing the blinking 
cursor between the two characters to be kerned and applying kerning 
has no effect on the spacing of the two characters.

   Perhaps this is the partial solution to your problem. Maybe you 
just need to select only the diacritical without selecting the 
character it is to be placed on top of. I don't know anything about 
the combining diacriticals, but I just tried this with two random 
characters and it seems to work reasonably well. Of course, you may 
also need to adjust the kerning of the character _after_ the 
combining diacritical to keep it properly spaced with the main 
character of the diacritical pair.

Best,
John

John Jason Jordan wrote:
>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.
>
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