[scribus] Fwd: Improve typographic rule support

[john Culleton]

On Thu, 27 Oct 2011 10:27:47 +0200
Czarek <czarek at oferuje.pl> wrote:

> > In Tex and InDesign the entire paragraph is considered before any
> > line breaking, hyphenation and word spacing decisions are made.
> 
> Do you have any proof that Tex and InDesign are working in that
> manner? I mean good commented source code.
> At least some explanation of typography design from developers, where
> they say that T or ID work in that manner.
> 
> You know... if I wouldn’t read C++ code, you could say same about
> Scribus to me and I must believe.
> 
> cezaryece
> 
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The nature of the TeX paragraph at a time justification has been
accepted since the early 1970's. The adoption by InDesign of the same 
algorithm is also well known and is acknowledged by  Adobe. We don't
need to dig through the source code on this matter. Chapters 6 and  14
of "The TeXBook" by eminent scholar and mathematician Donald Knuth
documents the two pass process by which this feature is implemented. A
third pass is optional.

There is a tag which will try to  make the paragraph one line longer or 
one line shorter, assuming that it will still meet the other
requirements laid on it. 

After 40 years +/- of the existence of TeX and the adoption of the same
algorithm by Adobe we need not waste time digging into the source code,
unless we wish to translate it into a form usable by Scribus. But you
are of course free to do so. I suggest that a reading of "The TeXBook"
chapters cited above would be sufficient. 

As a side note, Knuth offered a prize for each bug found in the
original TeX program, and the prize doubled with each bug. No one has
filed a claim for the prize in about two decades. 

-- 
John Culleton
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