[scribus] how does scribus do justification?

[VáclavŠmilauer]

> 2. The ideas for Scribus' optical margins and glyph scaling where taken from
> pdfTeX. The way Scribus does line-by-line justification using normal and
> minimum word spacing was my idea, but probably someone else had the same
> idea before.
> 3. I've a prototype for doing paragraph layout based on ideas from TeX, but
> it doesn't compile with current Scribus any more and has to wait for:
> 4. Restructuring of the text data structures to allow a) flexible
> association of glyphs with content chars, b) non-latin scripts, c)
> structured text, d) box-based layout (as in TeX's boxes)

I am reading the discussion here recalling
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/TextLayout which was aiming at library for
paragraph breaking (using HarfBuzz for shaping), but it seems there was no
activity along those lines so far, unfortunately.

Would it be substantially more difficult to implement the paragraph breaking
algorithm(s) as part of scribus that could be eventually used by other projects
or turned into library?

I was looking that the text frame layout code in scribus and given its hairyness
I would be afraid to touch it lest it breaks. OTOH, having that separately would
be an invitation for others (including me) to help with that.

Cheers, Vaclav