[scribus] What is Glyphenstauchung?

[Andreas Vox]

Rolf wrote:

> Thanks for your answers, Martin and Christoph. The thing is, I tried it 
> on a small paragraph, and it changed something, but I couldn't really 
> make out what it really does. Furthermore, I don't know how to use the 
> three values sensibly as I cannot really make out what their effects are.
> 
>  From what you told me, it's kinda default for an automatic function, i. 
> e. in contrary to Horizontal Scaling these values only become active 
> when Scribus decides so. And does it change the look of the font, narrow 
> it for instance (as the name suggests), or does it only put the letters 
> nearer to each other?

If you can see with the naked eye what glyph extension does, it's done wrong
;-)

It's a tool to support block justification. The usual strategy is to
1) enlarge spaces between words

That gives really bad results without hyphenation. For better results,
Scribus also:
2) reduces spaces between words
3) Lets the user modify the default word spacing
4) Stretches or shrinks glyphs horizontally.

2) already gives excellent results, good values are 66% - 80%. 
3) is a tool to fit given copy text to a given area.
4) is horizontal scaling on a line-by-line basis. Allowed values are 90% to
110%, but for aesthetic reasons you should try stay in the 97%-103% range. 
Other programs change the spacing between characters. I hate that since it
can give t   e   r   r   i   b   l   e      r   e   s   u   l   t   s . 
The glyphs keep their shape, but the text color (ratio between black and
white ink) changes drastically. Horizontal scaling doesn't 
change text color and doesn't change glyph shapes more than they are already
distorted when looked at at an angle instead of straight on: 
If you read a line that spans 30% viewing field (start of line at -15°,
center at 0°, end of line at 15°), the glyphs at the end of the lines
already 
have only 97% of the width of the characters in the center. Similar effects
happen when the page isn’t straight but bent near the binding edge.