[Scribus] On extra space [bug 424]

[John Culleton]

On Wednesday 28 April 2004 06:57 am, Mardigrafe - Louis 
Desjardins wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
> I was reading the discussion over bug 424 about the extra
> space and I'd like to add a little comment.
>
> It is suggested that Scribus could take care of the
> double spaces at the end of a sentence, like other
> languages such as LaTex and HTML do (that is, the extra
> space is automatically deleted). It is of course very
> common to put 2 spaces at the end of a sentence. Many
> people just don't know that typography in general doesn't
> like those extra spaces! This is why professionnals rely
> on utilities to get rid of all those spaces that can
> affect the overall quality of typography.

Two spaces is an old typewriter convention. And books 
published before about 1930 usually put extra space after 
all punctuation marks for readability. I think this got 
changed to save pages, and now the new standard is a normal 
wordspace. I still like to fudge a bit (in TeX) and leave 
small amounts of extra space  after commas and more after
end-of-sentence marks like periods and exclamation points. 
See my correspondence on this subject on comp.text.tex and 
the helpful reply furnished by Etienne Riga. The thread is 
titled "Re: Frenchspacing" and Etienne's reply is dated Sep 
8, 2003.

This kind of refinement is probably beyond Scribus as 
presently conceived. But Scribus could take a page out of 
the InDesign program and copy the TeX paragraph formatting 
routines in their entirety. They are legally copyable. 

TeX is written in a language called Web so the routines 
would need to be transliterated into whatever Scribus is 
written in (C++?) This would be a big undertaking but with 
big payoff. 
-- 
John Culleton
Able Typesetters and Indexers
http://wexfordpress.com