[scribus] Hyphenation

[john Culleton]

On Mon, 31 Oct 2011 11:54:09 +0000 (UTC)
Andreas Vox <avox at arcor.de> wrote:

> Cezary Grabski <czarek at ...> writes:
> 
> > 
> > > i think that andreas has already answered that question: he has
> > > prepared the use of the tex algorithm in scribus but the text
> > > engine is not yet ready for it...
> > 
> > Andreas wrote about hyphenation algo.
> > I mean (and John talks about that at the end of his post, as I
> > understand) whole paragraph based formatting like Tex do.
> > It is very interesting approach and many people will be happy with
> > it in Scribus. If Andreas is near implemenating it into Scribus we
> > should prey for commiting it soon.
> 
> I mentioned that prototype in another thread.
> 
> I agree that it is easier to implement TeX's paragraph layouter in
> Scribus than interfacing with a TeX process to get the results. Also
> TeX has it's own limitations, especially when it comes to
> non-rectangular textframes. For Scribus we need that, and also
> textframes with wholes, Bidi, and embedded inline frames. And if we
> want to tackle avoidance of rivers we will need our own code base,
> too.
> 
> /Andreas
> 
> 
> 
> 
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If you fit text to a non-rectangular shape then obviously the TeX
paragraph at a time justification becomes more difficult. But it can be
done. In "The TeXBook" and "TeX for the Impatient" there are examples of
fitting text to wineglass shapes, circles etc. using the \parshape
command described on page 101 in the TeXBook. The TeX code expected for
this tag is tedious, consisting of a long string of starting point/line
length parameters, one for each line. IMO it would be easier to
generate these values in a program and pass them to TeX.

The virtue of frontending TeX vs. just adopting the TeX paragraph
algorithm for Scribus is that the TeXcode is already there and it is
already debugged. You just have to generate the TeX tags correctly. 
And all the input, text and tags, are expressed in plain text. The
incorporation of the huge TeX feature set can be done one tag at a
time. The Scribus programmer can quit whenever he/she gets tired. 

In my experience rivers of text are not a problem with TeX. I don't
know if this is more TeX wizardry or just dumb luck. I will inquire.


-- 
John Culleton
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