[scribus] About text indenting in Scribus 1.5.(4 SVN)

[Gregory Pittman]

On 10/02/2017 08:20 PM, Gregory Pittman wrote:

> 
> I did find a rather ugly workaround. What it requires is direct editing
> of the SLA file.
> Let's imagine that the style for these paragraphs is Default Paragraph
> Style. Save the SLA after you import your text with the bold, italics
> and so on still present.
> 
> If you then open the SLA file in a plain text editor, look for a tag
> that starts with '<STYLE NAME="Default Paragraph Style"...'.
> Read along this tag to the INDENT="0" parameter. This is the indentation
> for the body of the paragraph. Change if needed.
> Now look for the FIRST="0" parameter. This is the indentation for the
> first line. It can be a negative number for a hanging indent, but if so,
> its absolute value cannot be greater then the INDENT value. In other
> words, if you want FIRST to be -20, then INDENT must be >= 20 (these
> values are in points).
> 
> Now save from the text editor and reload into Scribus, and you should
> see your indentations without affecting the various character styles
> inside the paragraphs.
> 
> I haven't tried it, but this may also work with other styles you may
> have created or imported.
> 

Here are some further notes on the structure of the SLA file in regard
to indentation and other styles.
Here is a fragment of a file I have been playing around with:

        <STYLE NAME="Default Paragraph Style" DefaultStyle="1" ALIGN="0"
DIRECTION="0" LINESPMode="0" LINESP="15" INDENT="0" RMARGIN="0"
FIRST="10" VOR="0" NACH="0" ParagraphEffectOffset="0" DROP="0"
DROPLIN="2" Bullet="0" Numeration="0" HyphenConsecutiveLines="2"
BCOLOR="None" BSHADE="100"/>

        <STYLE NAME="body" FIRST="15" FONT="Nimbus Roman No9 L Regular"
FONTSIZE="11" LANGUAGE="en_GB"/>

        <CHARSTYLE CNAME="Default Character Style" DefaultStyle="1"
FONT="Liberation Sans Regular" FONTSIZE="12" FONTFEATURES=""
FEATURES="inherit" FCOLOR="Black" FSHADE="100" HyphenWordMin="3"
SCOLOR="Black" BGCOLOR="None" BGSHADE="100" SSHADE="100" TXTSHX="5"
TXTSHY="-5" TXTOUT="1" TXTULP="96" TXTULW="-0.1" TXTSTP="-0.1"
TXTSTW="-0.1" SCALEH="100" SCALEV="100" BASEO="0" KERN="0"
LANGUAGE="en_GB"/>

There are 3 tags here. The first is the tag for Default Paragraph Style
and the third for the Default Character Style (part of the default style).

In the middle this is what happened when I created a new style named
"body", changed the font, the first line indent (FIRST), and the
fontsize. Notice that except for the LANGUAGE parameter, the only
parameters included in the new style tag are those differing from the
Default Paragraph and Character styles. So if I hadn't changed the FIRST
parameter, it wouldn't be there, but would need to be added to create a
first line indentation in the "body" style.

For now anyway, editing the SLA file directly seems to be the
best/easiest way to add indentation without affecting various character
styles within a paragraph. Perhaps indentation should work something
like the HTML <blockquote> tag (though better than that), and perhaps
indentation ought to be pulled out of Paragraph Styles so that it could
be implemented without changing the Styles of a paragraph. This would be
a big task, I think.

Greg