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IDProjectCategoryView StatusLast Update
0010502ScribusTypographypublic2012-12-30 06:40
Reporterlouisdesjardins Assigned To 
PrioritynormalSeverityfeatureReproducibilityN/A
Status newResolutionopen 
Summary0010502: Typographic Color
DescriptionUsers would be allowed to create as many “Typographic color” sets as they wish to accomplish the desired typographic color. Scribus would ship with a few predefined sets. The idea is to save those sets that could be seen as substyles, usable in a paragraph style.

"Typographic Color" is constantly coming to the surface from time to time so I thought of getting into this further. Some links below.

It's a long time shot since I believe we should have some way to simplify the work and get more consistent results with type. So here is what I suggest.

First, we need a new menu in Edit > Typographic Color

This will bring up the dialog attached here.

Filling this dialog and hitting ok will add a new "Typographic Color Set" in the top window of the dialog.

By default, Scribus will ship with 6 basic settings that can of course be edited at will by the users. (see below)

Users can add to this short list they own Set.

For the sake of the explanation, let's say we have those 6 basic settings. They constitute 6 options that will then appear in the Property Palette as Typographic Color. Users can select one of them from a new pull-down menu that will either be added to the PP or — my preference so far — be replacing the actual tabs for Optical Margins and for Advanced Settings (except the 3 fields that are more Type Effects than anything else in my view but this is highly debatable! and that we can move elsewhere in the PP [we will have more room with my suggestion]).

Without Hyphenation
Tight Justification No Hyphen | Medium Justification No Hyphen | Loose Justification No Hyphen

With Hyphenation
Tight Justification With Hyphen | Medium Justification With Hyphen | Loose Justification With Hyphen

Basically, we want to help the user by putting in his/her hand a powerful tool that will help achieve outstanding Typographic Color for body text with a single command in the PP while leaving all the room to create more Sets, as the work demands it.

Once the user is happy with the result, all the type settings, including this Typographic Color can be synthetised into a single Paragraph Style Sheet. The Typographic Color pull down menu will also appear in the Create Paragraph Style dialog in replacement of all the separate settings that is currently crowding this dialog.

Now, we may not want this in a new submenu of the Edit menu. I also gave this some thoughts. Since we're using the Prefs to deal with such lists (I am thinking of the list of custom document sizes), the other place where this could fit would obviously be in the Prefs. The behaviour would be the same. The list created there would appear in both the PP and in the Paragraph Style Dialog. We could apply it as any other settings — like a color or a pattern or make it part of a Paragraph Style Sheet. Easy.

So, this dialog I am proposing now is a first draft. It can be turned into a Prefs window that would include the 3 main settings that affect the Typographic Color: Optical Margins, Tracking and Glyph Extension... and Hyphenation.

You will note that I have removed 2 options for Optical Margins as I assume it has no effect when there are no hanging punctuation or hyphens on one side. So, unless I miss something, I see no reason to have the Right Only, Left Only and Both Sides distinction. It doesn't matter! The settings in my view is either ON or OFF and applies to both sides since only one side will be affected anyway, depending on the language being a Left-Right or a Right-Left language. Let me know if what I assume is wrong.

You will also note that I have added a couple more settings for Hyphenation. These are missing since the beginning. I have also removed the dinosaurs which are the 2 options Suggestions of Hyphenation and Hyphenate when Typing. They make simply no sense and we warn users not to use those settings so we better take them away.

Let me know what you think!


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typography#Color [^]
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gris_typographique [^]
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grauwert [^]
TagsNo tags attached.
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louisdesjardins

2012-01-09 02:14

developer  

typographiccolourV4.ui (14,106 bytes)

christoph_s

2012-12-30 06:40

administrator   ~0029537

Based on our email discussion, let me add some first remarks here. There are short-term and long-term goals. Short-term goals (i.e., post 1.5.0, pre 1.6.0) may include:

1) Moving all microtyphographic features into a seprate dialog/separate tabs. This could give us smaller dialogs/tabs and would be welcomed by XPress veterans (à la Style > Typography).

2) Making their use easier and more obvious. Requires some tinkering, but seems doable.

3) Adding an option to save microtypographic styles as in XPress. Doesn't look too difficult since it just means to save/load a subset of a SLA file separately.

Looks like a nice student/GSoC project to me ;)

Long-term, things are much more complicated, because we need a paragraph-based typesetting engine first (as in TeX and InDesign) and also have to prepare it for non-European scripts.

Issue History

Date Modified Username Field Change
2012-01-09 02:10 louisdesjardins New Issue
2012-01-09 02:14 louisdesjardins File Added: typographiccolourV4.ui
2012-12-30 06:40 christoph_s Note Added: 0029537