[scribus] Align text forced justified and non breaking space (ZASKE Martin)

[M. Ridinger]

Hi Martin,

I'm sure you are right about the "original" meaning of non-breaking spaces. Let
me say it other words: It would be nice to have two different kinds of spaces:
one with fixed width and a streching one. It doesn't matter if you call it
non-breaking space or if you create a new type of space. I'm thinking of
applications similar to LaTeX \hfill command. Together with "forced justified"
alignement you could create lines with both left and right aligned at once or
underline up to the end of line using one stretching single space. At the moment
this is (whithout workarounds like transparent characters) possible only for
single words because every space will be stretched.

Just a suggestion (because of my actual need of such functionality).

Many thanks,
Markus


Message: 2
Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2014 19:39:23 +0100
From: ZASKE Martin <zm at revue-gugu.org>
To: Scribus User Mailing List <scribus at lists.scribus.net>
Subject: Re: [scribus] Align text forced justified and non breaking
	space
Message-ID: <534593DB.9080200 at revue-gugu.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

Hi Markus,

the "non-breaking" feature is not about stretching, but it concerns not
breaking the "link" between the characters to the left and to the right
of that space. This is needed for example in orthographies like French,
where certain punctuation like ! ? : ; get separated from their sentence
by a (thin) space - but convention has it, that such punctuation should
never jump to a new line in spite of the presence of a space, ergo a
non-breaking space to "glue" that last word to the punctuation.

Personally I would think it more "natural" if all spaces in any given
line would stretch the same amount (in a context using justification),
whatever else their functionality might be. But many people have
opinions about that, and those spaces-with-punctuation are always
somewhat "exotic" anyway and mostly "thinner" than default spaces.

hth

Martin


I quote a little from the nice book Unicode Explained:

No-break space: use it!

The no-break space character U+00A0 is similar to a normal space but
does not allow a line break after it. That is, if you have ?foo bar?
with a no-break space between the words, then the words are kept on the
same line when the text is rendered or reformatted.
...... The no-break space is also called a ?hard space? or ?required
space,? though these unofficial names may also allude to other meanings,
which are often coupled with the non-breaking behavior.

[About stretching:]

In addition to its basic meaning, the no-break space usually has the
property of being of fixed width, for any given font. That is, it is
neither expanded nor shrunk in text justification. This behavior is not
defined in the Unicode standard [here you got it, Scribus developers can
do what they think best about this aspect], but it is very common.
It is probably often caused by the way programs deal with the no-break
space:
they treat it as a printable character, just with an empty glyph (of a
particular width), not as a character that controls spacing. It?s like
an alphabetic character, just empty.

Some programs, such as web browsers, by default collapse consecutive
spaces. That is, any sequence of space characters might be treated as
equivalent to a single space. The programs usually treat no-break space
characters as non-collapsing. This is natural, since no-break space is
usually treated as a fixed width character, as just explained.

end of quote, please consider buying this book, it is by Jukka K.
Korpela and available from O'Reilly


On 08.04.2014 20:41, M. Ridinger wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I don't know if this is a bug with scribus 1.4.3 and 1.5.0svn or not, but I
> would expect that using a "non breaking space" in a text line with "forced
> justified" alignment this is not stretched like a normal space. At the moment
> I
> use a transparent non-space character as workaround or is there some better
> way?
>
> By the way: while searching for a workaround for the problem above I found
> that
> using "manual tracking" in the "advanced settings" text properties breaks
> underlining.
>
> Apart from that peanuts I'm very happy with scribus. Thank you for that nice
> program.
>
> Markus
>
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-- ZASKE Martin responsable G?G? BP 50 - Bassila - B?nin tel G?G? 66.66.11.11
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