Balance text

[jason_clark]

I couldn't find any mention on here, but as a long time InDesign user looking at Scribus moving forward, a way of balancing the ragged edge of text paragraphs, like InDesign's 'Balance Ragged Lines' feature would be very welcome! It has an implementation in CSS which already works quite well (text-wrap: pretty or balance), though not yet fully supported. I'm unsure, but as XML is the Scribus format, would this be a relatively easy feature to introduce, referencing the CSS approach? Perhaps added where the optical alignment exists.

[AdmFubar]

i think you are looking for justification? you will fin the options to justify text in the content properties window when you have a text frame selected.

In the text content window look for the alignment entry, click to expand if it isnt already. There are several button to select the various justification options and vertical alignment.

Hope this helps

[a.l.e]

No, as far as I know, Scribus can't balance ragged text.

Sadly, the fact the Scribus uses XML for its .sla files is orthogonal to the ability of using CSS.

It might be possible to write a script that goes through the text and adds and removes hyphens while counting the length of the lines... but I'm not 100% sure.
(It's not trivial to create such a script, but, from what I've seen floating around, AI knows well the Scribus Scripter API : - )

[jason_clark]

AdmFubar,

Justification isn't what I was referring to. Balnacing paragraph text has been standard in InDesign for years. It helps prevent single words left on a line at the end of a paragraph, for example. Yes, you can play with tracking, but that implemented in InDesign recomposes the whole paragraph to ensure it looks more 'balanced'. Perhaps you haven't any experience of Adobe products. Illustrator has something similar as well. I'm not sure if anything else does something similar as I have been a heavy Adobe user for decades. Thought it worth asking as it's a very nice feature to have. It's a way of avoiding hyphenation, which generally looks bad unless you have to justify text.

As a.i.e. suggests, perhaps AI can help with a potential script. Something to investigate.

Thanks.

PS. This verification before posting is a pain in the arse. I'm doing it correctly but it keeps flagging up errors. Seems unnecessary.