[scribus] how does scribus do justification?

[John Culleton]

On Thursday 28 January 2010 13:37:14 Gregory Pittman wrote:
> On 01/28/2010 12:36 PM, John Culleton wrote:
> > Scribus, MSWord etc. only try to set one line at a time without regard to
> > what goes on in previous or following lines in the paragraph.
>
> I'd like to know what your evidence is for this conjecture.
> As I take a frame, highlight part of a line, then adjust its font size,
> width of glyphs, kerning, it doesn't take much adjustment before the
> line is giving away to or stealing from the following line.
>
> My guess is that you may be referring to built-in automated adjustments,
> such as has been implemented with word tracking in Scribus 1.3.5+.
> Certainly this feature has room for improvement, but even now, it's
> working on a paragraph level.
>
> Greg
>
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True enough. If you add text the line may overflow to the next, which then has 
to be reset, which may cause the next line to over flow etc. till you get to 
the end of the paragraph. But nowhere in this serial process is the paragraph 
as a whole evaluated to see what the optimum placement of extra space for 
justification is. If however you add material to a TeX line then the whole 
paragraph is evaluated for optimum placement of the extra space for 
justification.  That is called paragraph at a time justification. TeX does it, 
InDesign (using the TeX method) does it, and no other DTP programs do it.  
That is why TeX programs with hyphenation allowed will have a lower count of 
hyphens than the same document justified by e.g., Scribus or MSWord. 

In TeX of course hand kerning etc. is generally not done because the program 
does it better and considerably faster. I am talking body text now, and not 
display type on covers. 

If in Scribus 1.3.5 etc if a change in line five may change the word allotment  
between lines one and two or  prior hyphenation etc. then you indeed are 
working towards full paragraph justification. But I had not heard that this 
feature was present yet. 
-- 
John Culleton
"Create Book Covers with Scribus"
Printable E-book 38 pages $5.95
http://www.booklocker.com/books/4055.html