LibreOffice text justification

[Chris Tapp]

Hi Miklos,

On 7 Mar 2013, at 08:42, Miklos Vajna wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 06, 2013 at 11:07:27AM -0500, Kohei Yoshida <kohei.yoshida at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I manage a wiki which is being used to produce the text for a book
>> that is due to be published shortly. We can currently produce an ODT
>> document that is about 95% print-ready, but there are a few
>> typesetting features missing from LibreOffice which mean we will have
>> to use something like InDesign to complete our work flow.
>> 
>> One of these features relates to the justification of text. Word
>> processors like Writer tend to produce lines with uneven line-to-line
>> inter-word spacing as they do not generally consider reducing the
>> spaces and/or micro-spacing the characters themselves. I thought it
>> would be worth looking at the code-base of LibreOffice to see if it
>> would be possible to add this functionality. This search lead me to
>> your blog page at
>> http://kohei.us/2010/01/21/distributed-text-justification/.
>> 
>> It seems as if the code you modified when adding the 'Distributed
>> Justification' mode would be very similar to what I think is needed.
>> Could you please point me to the files / classes that were involved?
>> 
>> Any pointers would be much appreciated! Thank you for your time.
> 
> Paragraphs in Writer are "adjusted" to left/right/center/etc, the
> SvxAdjustItem class stores this info in the document model. However, I
> think Writer already supports what you want.
> 
> Have you tried Format -> Paragraph -> Alignment -> Justified, then
> setting Last line to Justified as well?

Thanks, that's what we currently use.

However, this doesn't give the same output as a professional typesetter would give.

As far as I can tell, LO only uses the inter-word spaces for justification and it only makes these larger.
This generally works fairly well in many cases, but it does sometimes lead to output with large gaps between
words and where the gaps vary significantly between the lines of a paragraph.

A more visually-pleasing result (important for book publication) can be obtained if the gaps are balanced within a paragraph.
This can be done by defining a range for the inter-word gap (e.g. 80% to 120% of 'normal') and allowing the
inter-character gaps to be altered as well (say -5% to 10%).

I think adding this to LO would be really nice (possibly as an 'advanced' setting to hide it from 'normal' users) and would give it a 
major feature advantage over 'standard' word processors ;-)

> HTH,
> 
> Miklos

Chris Tapp

opensource at keylevel.com
www.keylevel.com