[scribus] A New Concept of Character Spacing? (was Re: Why scribus lacks letter-spacing?)

avox avox at arcor.de
Mon Feb 8 16:10:33 CET 2010




William F. Maddock wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 2010-02-04 at 17:50 +0000, Hirwen HARENDAL wrote:
>> > From: billsey at earthlink.net
>> 
>> > >How do these concepts compare to InDesign's optical character
>> spacing?
>> > 
>> > I'm not sure, but I THINK my idea is a simpler concept. It would
>> involve the font designer, at the design stage, setting the "close
>> approach" value for the font (that is, how close any two visible
>> glyphs should approach each other at their closest points). On the
>> layout end, the engine would find where that close approach would be
>> for each of the visible-glyph pairs in use and set that close approach
>> to the value previously set for the font. No exceptions, no epicycles,
>> no Ptolemy. The engine would not care which glyphs are involved; it
>> just finds the closest approach for that pair and sets it to the
>> "close approach" value for that font.
>> 
>>  
>> 
>> ** Your "simple concept" need a lot of parameters
> 
> Actually, Hirwen, I think you're missing the concept. With the western
> character set, at least, it doesn't need a bunch of parameters. The
> vertical positioning has always been up to the designer, and that would
> not change. But horizontally, within a line, it really only needs the
> "close approach" setting. Nothing more.
>  

Actually, looking at the links further above in this thread, I think this
concept
is complicated enough even for western text. And the "closest approach"
isnt even the most important parameter for good letter spacing, regular stem
intervals
and white area between characters seem more important to me (e.g., why would
there
be any ligatures if good design demanded that there is a minimum distance
between
characters?)

Regards,
/Andreas
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