LibreOffice text justification

[Chris Tapp]

Hi Németh,

On 7 Mar 2013, at 15:54, Németh László wrote:

> 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.

Thanks for this, it looks like a good place to start :-)

Will it be possible to trigger the formatting
using something embedded in the document which then applies it to one or more specific paragraph styles?

It may also be worth looking at 'runt' control at the same time (though many think these should just be left).
A 'runt' is the small fragment of text which is sometimes pushed onto the last line of a paragraph. It can be
controlled by preventing single words on the last line or setting a minimum number of characters. Character
based control is often better as preventing long words dropping down on their own looks poor.

> Best regards,
> László
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> LibreOffice at lists.freedesktop.org
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Chris Tapp

opensource at keylevel.com
www.keylevel.com