[scribus] skewed text frame & text distances

[ale rimoldi]

hi greg

> >> It might be more of a feature request than a bug. For example, if
> >> you took a star shape or circle and converted to a text frame, you
> >> wouldn't necessarily expect star-shaped or circular Text
> >> Distances.  
> > 
> > euh, i would...
> > 
> > i don't see in what context, calculating the distance from the
> > bounding box could be useful...
> >   
> 
> The answer to that is easy, in a non-skewed rectangle.
> The text distances have a limited application. I don't see the sense
> in wasting the programming time to cover all instances. You have to
> have an entirely different concept. For a circle or a star shape,
> what is Top, Bottom, Left, and Right?
> Instructing people to use a second frame or perhaps the contour line
> makes a lot more sense.
> 
> If there is some answer to it, I think it would come from changing the
> mind set of the contour line. If you look at an SLA file in 1.5.x, we
> now have PATH and COPATH variables, which I take to describe the shape
> of the frame and contour line. A contour line will do everything Text
> Distances now does and much more. One of the things to overcome is
> that the contour line editing is so far hidden that you don't expect
> users to find it on their own.
> 
> Another idea: why not, instead of these text distances, be able to
> shrink the frame shape while leaving the contour line alone? This is
> in effect what text distances are doing.

while i agree with you, that in most cases having two (or multiple
frames is a better idea, if the feature exists and it does not work as
people expects, then it's a bug.

and i'm not sure that -- as soon as you leave the comfort zone of the
rectangular frame -- the form of the shape has any consequences on the
calculation... you just have to calculate it correctly, which is not
trivial.

ciao
a.l.e

p.s.: i'm all for removing half baked features that are hard to use
and not really essential to scribus... but i'm really in
the minority here...