[scribus] Flush Right - WordPerfect Style

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 18 Dec 2009 10:03:08 +0100
"a.l.e" <ale.comp_06 at xox.ch> dijo:

>hi john jason,
>
>> No, the feature Jonathan is looking for is different. In WordPerfect
>> you can type at the left edge of the frame, then enter a "flush
>> right" command and the rest of the text on the line will be right
>> justified at the right edge of the frame. 
>>
>> In Scribus (and everything else I have ever used) you accomplish this
>> by setting a right-aligned tab at the position of the right edge of
>> the frame. E.g., if your frame is, say, 400 points wide, then your
>> right tab will be at 400 points. When you type text it starts at the
>> left edge of the frame, but when you enter a tab the remaining text
>> is right aligned at the right edge of the frame (400 points).

>the magic feature from wordperfect may be interesting for right
>aligning the last line on frames with different width or with frames
>which don't have a reectangular form (think: flowing around a picture).
>
>still, i wonder how much it is relevant for real life tasks:
>- if you have to set the width of all the frames, setting a tab is not 
>really a huge task...
>- it will be hard to make people aware of the fact that the feature 
>exists, so nobody would use it in real life.
>
>i guess, it would be not very difficult to add a setting in the 
>paragraph styles to have a the text left aligned / justified but a tab 
>on the last line flushes to the right instead of going to the next tab
>stop.
>
>but is it worth the hassle?

It would be worth the hassle for Jonathan. But I can do without it. I
need other features far more than I need the magic WordPerfect feature.
The world is not a perfect place and we have to do what we can. 

Nevertheless, there are times when I wish I had the feature. I wonder
if someone could write a script that would automatically make a
right-aligned tab at the right edge of the frame. If we could assign
the script to a hotkey we would be close to the same functionality.
You'd just have to redo the right-aligned tab every time you change the
width of the frame, but it wouldn't be bad if it took just a keystroke.