[scribus] Paragraph Justification (Christen)

[Louis Desjardins]

2011/11/20 Murray Strome <wmstrome at yahoo.com>

> Original Message:
>
>                Tuesday, November 15, 2011 8:52 PM
>
>
>
>            From: "Christen" <christenanderson1994 at gmail.com>
>
>
>
>                Not sure if this is at all feasible, but why not get rid of
> the forced
> justify icon and instead do something similar to the underline or shadowed
> text settings in the PP. For instance, when you click on the "underline"
> option, it underlines the text (as expected). But when you click and hold
> down for a moment, a small menu appears with width and displacement
> options.
> You could have the normal justify button, that simply justified the text,
> but if you click and hold down on the button, you can have the option for
> forced justification.
>
> (Hope that all made sense. Having a hard time explaining what I mean) :)
>
> Christen
>
> Now that I have found excellent uses for the forced justification and know
> where it is located, I strongly recommend leaving it as it is. It makes
> much more sense to leave it with the other forms of justification than to
> move it somewhere else.
>

However, leaving things as they are at the moment still leads to confusion.
And it's been around since the introduction of the settings, so years of
confusion for quite a few people who use one for the other while the use
for justification "regular" (if you allow me this word) is massive in
comparison to the other one.

I don’t speak for myself and I expect just about any professional to know
which to use, when and why. And once one has found out, it's like going on
a bicycle, you can't forget! But for the many others that are simply lost
with all the possible settings and still manage their way to make a layout,
for those I still believe there is a glitch we can correct.

The icon might not be clear enough?
If we leave the icon as is, then maybe push it out of the series. Or put
Left - Center and Right in a row, then Justify, the Forced Justify ? So:
[L][C][R]  [J]  [FJ]

Or even less confusing, [J]  [L][C][R]  [FJ]

I mean, it's purely a case of presenting things in an way where it will be
at least clear enough that one cannot be taken for the other or at least
ring a bell that there is a difference. The solutions I propose might just
not make it as well, but the issue remains nonetheless.

Align Text Left
Align Text Center
Align Text Right
Align Text Justify
Align Text Forced Justify

Those are the tooltips. Maybe the reason for confusion also lies in those
few words.

I found this very interesting explanation that may put some more light into
this discussion:

Alignment refers to the side of the page or column with which the text is
even. For example, text that is even with the left side of the page margin
or column is said to be “flush left,” “aligned left,” or sometimes “rag
right” since it is uneven (or ragged) on the right side. Other options are:
flush right (also called rag left), centered, justified (flush on both left
and right sides, except for the last line, which is flush left), and forced
justified (which justifies even the last line). Most body text is either
flush left or justified. Headlines and subheads are normally flush left or
centered; however, centered text should be used with care. Flush right
should only be used for design purposes, and then only for small amounts of
text. Forced justified is rarely used.
Source: www.ideastraining.com/PDFs/TypographyBasics.pdf

The very least we could do is to update the tooltip like (any better or
shorter phrasing will be appreciated):
TOOLTIP: This option is the same as the justify one with the difference
that it will force the last line to be justified as well. If all you want
is to create columns with the last line being flush left (most common use),
use the Justify text option.

Louis

> Murray
>
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