justification issues (was: [libreoffice-users] Libre Writer 5.1.1.3 - space correction between text words)

On 29/04/16 05:45, Brian Barker wrote:
.....
> Text can be distributed within lines in various ways: left aligned,
> centred, right aligned, or justified. The first three modes will
> maintain constant, standard spacing between words, but the last
> intentionally expands spaces between words in order to fill all lines
> with text between the margins. If you don't want your text justified,
> don't use that mode. The mode is specified on the Alignment tabs of the
> Paragraph and Paragraph Style dialogues.

Can I interject a long-standing issue here, in which LO is by no means 
the sole offender?

It seems that full justification is always done linewise with no 
look-ahead. What's done seems something "gather words on a line until 
the next one won't fit; add spaces to this line to justify".

In pathological cases, this results in well-justified text for some 
lines, plus atrocious spacing on the next line. (sample random text 
below). This happens particularly in newspapers, where narrow columns 
exacerbate the effect, even with hyphenation.

The cure would be to look ahead (I've seen this done using DP) and 
optimise a whole paragraph at a time, rather than a line at a time. You 
can simulate this with a manually-inserted line-end near the "XXX" in 
the sample below (although LO will leave the unneeded space, it shows 
the general effect.) The overall presentation can be much improved, but 
clearly the code would be more complex and slower than now.

If anyone's doing a major overhaul of LO, this may perhaps be worth 
considering.

Thoughts?



Sample: try putting this into an A4 page, 2cm margins, TNR 12pt, fully 
justified). You should get 4 lines, of which the third has 3 long words 
with large spacing.

F ads dfg sdfg sdffg sdfg sdfg sdf gsd fgs dfg sdfg sdf gsd fgsdf F ads 
dfg sdfg sdffg sdfg sdfg sdf gsd fgs dfg sdfg sdf gsd fgsdf F ads dfg 
sdfg sdffg sdfg sdfg sdf gsd fgs dfg sdfg XXX gsd fgsdf 
ddddddddddddddddddddddd sssssssssssssssssssssss 
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa   aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa dfg sdfg sdf 
gsd fgs dfg sdfg sdf gsd fgsdf



--
Mike Scott (unet2 <at> [deletethis] scottsonline.org.uk)
Harlow Essex England

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