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Scribus => Layout Issues => Topic started by: eudoxos on March 19, 2018, 04:00:30 PM

Title: First line offset - misaligned baselines
Post by: eudoxos on March 19, 2018, 04:00:30 PM
I am using trunk (1.5.4svn). I have several vertically aligned frames, containing alternately thai and romanized thai. I would like the baselines to be vertically aligned. The "First Line Offset" option has a few options, but not all of the mare useful in this situation.

"Line spacing" should have solved the issue (as I can set that one in style settings) but it is higher if the glyphs are higher than line spacing, such as in this example of stacked tone mark & vowel in Thai.

(http://forums.scribus.net/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2866.0;attach=2537)

Is this a bug or is it expected? I read somewhere the first line offset undergone substantial changes in 1.5.x, maybe this went unnoticed? IMHO the spacing should be kept regardless of material sticking out.

What is the way to align baselines? Please don't suggest baseline grid (too inflexible, I have several rows of those and need to move them around). Table would be good? How is baseline computed there?

Thanks!

PS Related: how can I change first line offset for several frames at once? Multiple selection disables the option panel.


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Title: Re: First line offset - misaligned baselines
Post by: a.l.e on March 19, 2018, 04:34:15 PM
one single frame with tabulators...
Title: Re: First line offset - misaligned baselines
Post by: eudoxos on March 20, 2018, 10:25:33 AM
Quote from: a.l.e on March 19, 2018, 04:34:15 PM
one single frame with tabulators...
Good try, but not possible, Thai is aligned to the left and romanization to the right; they are horizontally aligned to image edges above.
Title: Re: First line offset - misaligned baselines
Post by: a.l.e on March 20, 2018, 11:14:06 AM
use left and right aligned tabulators.

if it does not work, it's a bug...
Title: Re: First line offset - misaligned baselines
Post by: eudoxos on March 23, 2018, 07:40:37 AM
I will look at that, but, honestly, it feels like right ear itching, left foot scratching left cheek. Mixing two scripts means I cannot just assign paragraph styles but will have to assign character styles to individual words.

I think it is a bug anyway that the first like offset cannot be controlled in an easy way; think of TeX, you have \strut, \smash, \phantom and all that (that was 30 years ago!).
Title: Re: First line offset - misaligned baselines
Post by: a.l.e on March 23, 2018, 08:48:48 AM
eudoxos, your replies are getting funkier and funkier...

sadly, it's a bit hard to reproduce what you are doing, since i can only manage to type "latin" languages.

but:

- using tabulators is very compatible with paragraph styles (and you cannot set tabulators in character styles)
- in this case, using tabulators is a solution, not a hack.
- in scribus, you can very well control the vertical offset of a character

upload a .sla with 4 lines, each line with four "words" in different scripts, separated by a tabulator.
and the links to the fonts one needs to install.
and i can try it out.

maybe it does indeed not work... but until proven of the contrary, this seems to be something trivial to solve with tabulators.
Title: Re: First line offset - misaligned baselines
Post by: eudoxos on March 24, 2018, 07:09:01 AM
Okay, point taken :) Thanks for your suggestions.

Just to clarify paragraph styles: Thai and the romanization use different fonts, hence need different styles; having them interspersed in the text (tabulators) means I cannot assign style to linked frames of Thai at once, but need to select character styles for individual items.

(I also tried with tables, and there is the same "issue", baselines are not always aligned.)
Title: Re: First line offset - misaligned baselines
Post by: a.l.e on March 24, 2018, 09:33:45 AM
i have a plugin that allows the use of the keyboard for applying styles...
sometimes, i forget how painful it is to "manually" apply styles...

you can use it right now, if you're compiling scribus yourself

https://github.com/aoloe/scribus-plugin-applyStyle

and at some time (probably after 1.5.4 will be relased) it will land in scribus itself.