Fwd: LibreOffice text justification

[Németh László]

Hi,

It seems, LibreOffice uses a TeX-like penalty system for
justification, but without modifiable options and pdfTeX-like
microtypography features. There are other problems in this area, for
example, the (sometimes very ugly) missing kerning before the
automatic hyphen character and the missing italic correction. (Also
adding the hyphenation zone setting of the other word processors would
be fine for left/right aligned paragraphs).

Maybe a good method to improve typesetting of LibreOffice to add a new
option for automatic extra (but limited) kerning/scaling of characters
of lines with extra large spaces, but without the modification of the
line breaks. I have made a Basic prototype to automatize this
line-oriented character formatting (for all lines of a document,
except the last lines of the paragraphs), allowing max. +4% character
width and max. +3% kerning (for example, max. 0,36 pt extra character
distance between 12pt characters):

http://www.numbertext.org/tmp/micro.bas

(Note: scaling of Graphite fonts doesn't modify the line breaks, so
remove this section from the prototype to test it with Graphite
fonts.)

The test results seem better, than the original typesetting, except
the hanging hyphen marks (this is a bug):

http://www.numbertext.org/tmp/micro_all.pdf

(micro.odt and micro_nohyph.odt are the original test files without
modified kerning and scaling:

http://www.numbertext.org/tmp/micro.odt
http://www.numbertext.org/tmp/micro_kern.odt
http://www.numbertext.org/tmp/micro_scale.odt
http://www.numbertext.org/tmp/micro_kern_and_scale.odt
http://www.numbertext.org/tmp/micro_nohyph.odt
http://www.numbertext.org/tmp/micro_nohyph_kern.odt
http://www.numbertext.org/tmp/micro_nohyph_scale.odt
http://www.numbertext.org/tmp/micro_nohyph_kern_and_scale.odt)

I plan to add a sophisticated version (maybe with shrinking, testing
also minimal paragraph width modifications) to the typography toolbar
(http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center/typography-toolbar)
to fix the selected paragraphs with one click.

Best regards,
László