[scribus] Fwd: Improve typographic rule support

[john Culleton]

On Mon, 24 Oct 2011 12:00:17 +0200
Czarek <czarek at oferuje.pl> wrote:

> Discuse from other place:
> >> Personally I would like to change way how Scribus justify lines of
> >> text when text don`t feet line width and large spaces are inserted
> >> in line. In other layouting apps I saw option for set maximum
> >> space width and
> > maximum glyphs kerning loose if calculated space width is above
> > maximum 
> value.
> > It works similar to current glyph extension feature, but for me it
> > creates better formatted lines as glyphs are not extended but
> > kerning is looser.
> > I think combining the two methods (loosing kerning and glyph
> > extension) should give users best possible method to avoid
> > appearing of large wide spaces.
> >
> >cezaryece
> 
> >I hate automatic character spacing. If you limit it to 5% it will
> >not help
> > more than glyph stretching and if you allow more, it's most ugly.
> 
> Yes, but significantly limit places where it is unacceptable. And
> character spacing looks much better for me than 5% glyph extension.
> And in preflight verifier should be warning (as switch-able option)
> for exceeded maximum space width.
> 
> For me extending glyphs is just ugly option at all, for you
> increasing char spacing is ugly - maybe there should be both methods
> used at once. Effect will be stronger with smaller visual impact.
> 
> >IMO the correct behaviour for formatting lines when a maximum space
> > limit is exceeded would be to break inside a word
> > even if there is no recommended break position.
> >
> >/Andreas
> 
> And for me that behaviour is not acceptable - automation wouldn’t
> create formatting errors like wrong hyphenation point!!!
> But maybe remove hyphenation from last word of previous line would be
> correct and helpful.
> 
> cezaryece
> 
> 
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In TeX character expansion/shrinking can be set at very small
increments for each. In the TeX world this is called microtypography.
But TeX and InDesign also evaluate the entire paragraph before making 
any decisions on line breaks and/or hyphenation.

Is it too late to consider this approach for Scribus? Currently
Scribus will render only LaTeX and the typeface choices are limited. 
But now that there are Luatex and Xetex all the system fonts can be
used. IMO the use of LaTeX instead of plain pdftex was a mistake. The
superstructure of LaTeX is not what we need in Scribus. Luatex requires
less overhead and all the features of math typesetting  etc. are still 
available. 

Scribus is essentially wysiwyg and TeX is compilative. But the
paragraph making code could be copied, including the microtypography 
part, just as hanging punctuation was incorporated into Scribus.
Adobe took that same paragraph making code and incorporated it into 
InDesign. Can we do the same?

-- 
John Culleton
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