[scribus] how does scribus do justification?

[avox]

John Jason Jordan-2 wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:24:31 EST
> EilertO at aol.com dijo:
> 
>>I am using MSWord at this time and am not very happy with how it
>>justifies lines (only uses spaces between words, no kerning) and even
>>less happy with page bottom justification.   Does Scribus offer
>>anything better?   Also, are Word docs importable transparently into
>>Scribus?   I am not yet a user, just want to know what can be done.
> 
> ...
> 
> Justification is based on the entire paragraph, not just line by line.
> Kerning can be adjusted inter-word and inter-character. You really need
> to install Scribus, then practice with some text to see what I mean. 
> 

Err, Scribus doesn't do justification based on the entire paragraph - yet.
Justification is done by extending and shrinking spaces between words,
and optionally also by scaling characters in x-direction. Character spacing
is not touched by the justification algorithm (I hate seeing character
spacing
used for justification, tbh.)
 
You get best results if you allow a minimum word space of 50%-66% of 
the average space width. And if you hyphenate, of course. Character scaling
only provides marginal improvement compared to hyphenation and setting the
minimum word space below 100%.

Scribus uses the font's kerning tables for automatic kerning. You can also
manually
adjust the space between characters but that should only be used as a last
resort.
If you want really neat margins you can enable optical margins in Scribus:
that
implements hanging punctuation and a modest margin kerning for problematic
characters
like 'r' and 'f'.

Vertical alignment of text and suppressing orphans & widows is planned for a
future version
of Scribus (together with the paragraph layouter :-) )

Switching from a word processor to Scribus is a major step since the whole
paradigm is different. You
have to understand that word processors are in the tradition of typewriters,
but layout programs
are in the tradition of scissors and glue. We usually recommend to use
OpenOffice for creating text
and then import that text into Scribus.

/Andreas

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