[scribus] Fwd: Improve typographic rule support

[Gregory Pittman]

On 10/27/2011 06:10 AM, JLuc wrote:
> Le 27/10/2011 11:30, Czarek a écrit :
>>> LOL. This has been known for ages.
>>
>> And now you all see how clerkless I am ... ;-)
>
> I think that you are a wonderfull user,
> and i totally agree with : at this point, usability matters most.
>
>  > who cares about it, if it is acceptable enough and users want to put
> best
>  > quality out for usability...
>
> Usability, userfriendliness, ergonomie, quality User Interface,
> affordance, ...
>

I think it's more important to have some understanding of what makes for 
a good outcome of whatever algorithm you are using. If you don't you 
simply have some smug attitude that you are using "the best" and by some 
people's definition, everything else is inferior.

I certainly don't consider myself an expert in this. What I look for is 
an overall pleasing look to a block of text (i.e., no rivers or other 
unintended visual distractions), that there is a limited use of 
hyphenation (and especially not several lines with hyphenation one after 
the other), and that when hyphenation is used, it is not such that there 
is no intuitive sense of what the rest of the word on the next line 
might be -- this leads to a small cognitive hitch as you read through 
some text. One also looks for awkward hyphenation.

In John's Scribus PDF (full width):
... re-
ceived ...	
this is very ambiguous. In general, various short syllable breaks, like 
in-, de-, re- have so many possible endings. This can be the most 
difficult to prevent.

InDesign:
... pri-
vate ...
one might consider preventing hyphenation of 2-syllable words to avoid this.

Finally, this one in TeX:
... announc-
ing ...
I have to say, I think this one is quite a mistake. Who would hyphenate 
announcing at this point in the word? Note that Scribus has a better 
announ-cing.

So to intentionally belabor this a bit, all of these DTP programs have 
issues. None is perfect. Each one requires scanning for unpleasant 
surprises or bad choices.

Greg