[scribus] Hyphenation

[Andreas Vox]

john Culleton <John at ...> writes:

> 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.

Yes, but a) it doesn't allow for holes in the shape and b) you have to 
guess the line height.

> 
> 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. 

You also have to make sure that Scribus and TeX are using the same fonts.
AFAIK that's only feasable with LuaTeX which is still beta. Also, apart
from LuaTeX, TeX exports its results only as PDF or DVI (or log output), 
so Scribus would have to parse the results to get the needed information.

We already have renderframes for TeX and we might expand that by providing
parshapes, fonts and colors from Scribus to TeX. But renderframes wont
work as a general solution for everyone.

> 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. 

Trust me as a programmer, it's not that simple :-)

> 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.

I'm pretty sure that's luck. Of course, if you only have minimal white 
space the probability for rivers is also smaller.


/Andreas