[scribus] Fwd: Improve typographic rule support

john Culleton John at wexfordpress.com
Fri Oct 28 02:50:08 UTC 2011


On Thu, 27 Oct 2011 09:31:11 -0400
Louis Desjardins <louis.desjardins at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2011/10/27 Gregory Pittman <gregp_ky at yahoo.com>
> 
> > On 10/27/2011 06:10 AM, JLuc wrote:
> >
> >> Le 27/10/2011 11:30, Czarek a écrit :
> >>
> >>> LOL. This has been known for ages.
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>> And now you all see how clerkless I am ... ;-)
> >>>
> >>
> >> I think that you are a wonderfull user,
> >> and i totally agree with : at this point, usability matters most.
> >>
> >>  > who cares about it, if it is acceptable enough and users want
> >>  > to put
> >> best
> >>  > quality out for usability...
> >>
> >> Usability, userfriendliness, ergonomie, quality User Interface,
> >> affordance, ...
> >>
> >>
> > I think it's more important to have some understanding of what
> > makes for a good outcome of whatever algorithm you are using. If
> > you don't you simply have some smug attitude that you are using
> > "the best" and by some people's definition, everything else is
> > inferior.
> >
> > I certainly don't consider myself an expert in this. What I look
> > for is an overall pleasing look to a block of text (i.e., no rivers
> > or other unintended visual distractions), that there is a limited
> > use of hyphenation (and especially not several lines with
> > hyphenation one after the other), and that when hyphenation is
> > used, it is not such that there is no intuitive sense of what the
> > rest of the word on the next line might be -- this leads to a small
> > cognitive hitch as you read through some text. One also looks for
> > awkward hyphenation.
> >
> > In John's Scribus PDF (full width):
> > ... re-
> > ceived ...
> > this is very ambiguous. In general, various short syllable breaks,
> > like in-, de-, re- have so many possible endings. This can be the
> > most difficult to prevent.
> >
> > InDesign:
> > ... pri-
> > vate ...
> > one might consider preventing hyphenation of 2-syllable words to
> > avoid this.
> >
> > Finally, this one in TeX:
> > ... announc-
> > ing ...
> > I have to say, I think this one is quite a mistake. Who would
> > hyphenate announcing at this point in the word? Note that Scribus
> > has a better announ-cing.
> >
> > So to intentionally belabor this a bit, all of these DTP programs
> > have issues. None is perfect. Each one requires scanning for
> > unpleasant surprises or bad choices.
> >
> 
> I have added a comment to an existing bug and a .ui file that I
> believe would be one way of making Scribus work better for users and
> help achieve a smoother typographic color. Please let me know what
> you think and if this is implementable.
> 
> http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=9848
> 
> Louis
> 
> >
> > Greg
> >
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The Merriam-Webster Dictionary says announc-ing. Sorry. 

It is very easy in TeX to specify the hyphenation points of a word not
found in the hyphenation dictionary. It is also easy to set in
advance the minimum length of a hyphenated word-half, pre and post
hyphen. Deliberately in my example I did not use these features, any
more than I used manual kerning, forced line breaks etc. I really
don't have time to go through every issue. Read the TeXBook.

TeX is not perfect. But for basic typesetting it is better than all
the rest.

-- 
John Culleton
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