[scribus] Automatic Line Spacing

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 06 May 2009 13:47:35 -0400
Gregory Pittman <gregp_ky at yahoo.com> dijo:

> John Jason Jordan wrote:
> > 1.3.5 Beta, April 19.
> >
> > I do mostly linguistics work so my main font is Junicode. Junicode has
> > a small x-height, so for body text it looks best at about 12 points. I
> > have defined that as paragraph style "Normal" along with Automatic Line
> > Spacing. This looks fine to me. All my other paragraph styles are based
> > on Normal.
> >
> > Looking in File > Preferences I see that Automatic Line Spacing is set
> > to 20%. To me that means that the entire line should be 120% of 12
> > points, or 14.4 points. 
> >
> > Looking at a text frame in my present work that is 686 points high I
> > find that it contains 39 lines of text, where all the text is set to
> > Normal. This means that each line is actually taking 17.58 points. 
> >
> > I must have misunderstood what the 20% means in File > Preferences. If
> > I set my styles to Automatic Line Spacing, how can I find out what
> > spacing Scribus is actually using? Or have I discovered a bug?

> It's a little bit tricky, and you have to understand how to some extent 
> this needs to work. While there may be some automatic adjustment of 
> linespacing, there also needs to be an ability to override this 
> manually. The default setting of "Fixed Linespacing" allows for this 
> manual override, which typically occurs when you are in Edit Contents 
> mode in the main display, or in Story Editor. Therefore if you change 
> font size in either of these two modes, the linespacing may not adjust. 
> It will in Select Item mode, but these changes happen for the whole frame.
> 
> An alternative setting to Fixed is "Automatic Linespacing", where it 
> should always adjust and you will not be able to manually adjust spacing.

Thanks for the reply.

What I don't understand is why Preferences says 20%, and elsewhere in
Preferences it shows 14.4 points, yet the text in the frame is actually
about 17.5 points.

I think I'm just going to give up on Automatic Linespacing. Too
confusing for me. In fact, the 17.5 points looks good - I need a lot of
space because my text frames are pretty wide. You know the old rule
foir legibility - the wider the column the greater the leading. I think
I'm just going to redo this document with fixed linespacing at 17.5
points for my Normal style which will cascade through my other styles.
I'll have to tweak all the frames in the document, but it shouldn't be
a big problem. And then I'll have something consistent.

But see the other post I'm going to make right after this about
Baseline Grid.