justify text vertically

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rlocatelli

I'm a book publisher. In books, we must have all pages justified vertically. I'm not talking about adjust the textbox to the text. Is the OPPOSITE: distribute the text vertically to fill the size of the text box. I didn't found the tool to do this. Is there some script to do that? If not, Scribus has a lack that must be corrected.

utnik

hi rlocatelli

we've discussed this earlier on the german scribus forum...

my two short answers:

       
  • scribus doesn't support vertical justification of text (so far...)
  • it's no big lack, as vertically justified text is bad typography anyway. (i know that some publishers do it regularly.)
if you really need it, you should file a feature request on the bug tracker.
utnik

rlocatelli

Thank you for your reply, utnik!
Well, all the books I've read are justified vertically and all the books I prepare for print must be so. Otherwise it's classified as non professional layout. Because of that this tool comes as native resource in "the other" layout software. Ok, for now I have to use "the other".
According to your explanation, it's not a bug, but an option. Even so, I will report on the bug tracker.
Thanks again for your reply.

a.l.e

hi r

if you have read the german thread linked by utnik (there are translators like google that could help you understand it), manutius is giving a usage example for a justification breaking the line spacing.
personally, i feel, that in that case (a frame in smaller / bigger font), an automatic vertical justification only becomes interesting, if we first have some sort of snapping of the text lines to the guides (or even the baseline grid).
otherwise, i only see a marginal (if any) speed improvement in the workflow.
also, i don't have the feeling, that this feature is required for books printing... at least not around here...

on the other side -- a justification that would not mangle the ligne spacing -- there is already a ticket in the bug tracker:

https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=1156

as you see, it's an old ticket... this means that an external sponsor providing the programming work might be needed to get it done.
and this also means, that it's not trivial to implement the feature correctly!

i think that this second way of justifying would be very welcome if done correctly...

so:

- find programmers that are interested in working on this
- discuss the feature with the team
- estimate the work charge
- start a crowd founding to finance their work
- get the programmers to do the work
-  deliver the patch to the team

if i googled your username correctly, you should be living in a country where something like this is possible... (enough people with programming skills; a good user basis for open source software for graphics)

Nermander

Good typography is that the text lines on the front and the back of each page should have the same spacing and line up.

That's one of the reasons to use a baseline grid.

rlocatelli

In Brazil the standard professional layout for books is with justified pages, except for chapter end. I know that this is so in several countries.
I think that good softwares should provide all options, letting for the user the choice, instead of purposely deny resources.

a.l.e

hi r

on the one side you're right: it's a very good practice to vertically justify pages in a book!

but -- as already written --  this is normally done by tweaking the spaces between words and characters and not not by modifying the line spacing.
at least this seems to be common in the european countries where utnik, nermander and myself are living (which could be one single country or two, depending on who is looking at us :-)

btw, you're not denied the option to have vertical justification in scribus!
this is open source software!
you can provide a patch that does this and if it's good enough, it's very likely that the team will accept.
it's not a stupid feature, even if i would not use it in books!
you just have to find a programmer that is ready to spend time on this and get it implemented correctly
and brazil is really not the worst place for looking for programmers for open source.

on top of it, if you can find a programmer that can (also) code a vertical justification that does not rely on line spacing, you'll get a huge thanks from all of us!
promised!