[scribus] LGM 2013 Lightning Talk Slides

["Christoph Schäfer"]

> Gesendet: Donnerstag, 25. April 2013 um 04:26 Uhr
> Von: "Gregory Pittman" <gpittman at iglou.com>
> An: "Scribus User Mailing List" <scribus at lists.scribus.net>
> Betreff: Re: [scribus] LGM 2013 Lightning Talk Slides
>
> On 04/24/2013 12:44 PM, Manuel Schmalstieg wrote:
> > Actually, I wasn't thinking about the ePubs yet. For me the point is mostly
> > to know what a style is doing. By looking "under the hood", I can see
> > exactly what that style does. When you are used to that by designing with
> > CSS, it's irritating when a GUI hides that information from you :)
> >
> > Regarding CSS and typography, I believe that the essential settings exist
> > already:
> >
> > https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/CSS/letter-spacing
> > https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/CSS/word-spacing
> > https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/CSS/text-indent
> > https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/CSS/font-feature-settings
> > https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/CSS/::first-line
> > https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/CSS/::first-letter
> >
> > What's missing ? :)
> >
>
> Perhaps not missing, but one has to manage the complexity of
> microtypography, which in practice needs to be more of a GUI operation
> than an under the hood operation. In the end, you need to play visually
> with what you see. Admittedly, Scribus as it is can and should be better
> at this than it current is.
>
> Greg

CSS is definitely not on par with microtypographic requirements for print yet (and probably never will be because it's not necessary). But Alexandre noted correctly that there is a considerable overlap, so a "superset" might make sense -- what isn't covered by CSS could be ignored during export to epub.

If I may, I'd like to expand the view by looking back at existing solutions:

- Editing the source code (as in Inkscape or InDesign);

- Editing "formatting codes" as in WordPerfect;

- Editing typographic style sheets à la Quark XPress;

- Adding additional TeX commands/markup to documents in LyX (in the case of Scribus, these would be Scribus formatting options).

These are all different, yet somehow similar approaches to an existing problem.

As I see it, three problems arise:

1) Can we agree on a solution in time?

2) Is it feasible to modify the transitional 1.5.0svn format without delaying the release of 1.5.0?

3) Who will write the code?

If the answer to any of these questions is "No" or "No idea", then it should be postponed to the 1.7/1.8 release cycle.

Christoph