Re: [office] proposal; Amend fo:letter-spacing

[Jirka Kosek <jirka@kosek.cz>]

Thomas Zander wrote:

> The difference is less about the actual difference in layouting (though it is 
> important) its more about the different way of using. (UseCase)
> A common goal the user has in mind when he adjusts the letter-spacing in 
> typesetting is to make it possible to make a word fit on a line, to avoid 
> hyphenation for example.
> In percent based letter spacing effectively adjusts the width of the whole 
> selected region in, well, a percentage of the effective width.
> So if you have a sentence that has a text width of 100 and you apply a 97% 
> letter spacing to it the text will end up being 97.  Irregardless of the 
> amount of characters on the line.

I can understand to your usecase, but I don't think that such 
requirement should be expressed using fo:letter-spacing as this would 
break "compatibility" with XSL-FO. Moreover, your usecase seems more as 
a constraint on layout algorithm which can result in modification of 
interletter space, but not vice versa.

Maybe some completely new attribute like visual-compression="97" would 
be more appropriate.

> Note that I'm not saying that one method is good and one method is bad. Qt4 
> supports both, and from a user perspective I think KOffice should use the 
> percent based one. Its just easier to use and more in line with what users 
> want to achieve.

It's questionable. For example, I have never specified letter-spacing 
using percentages before, I have been always specifying length directly.

> Thanks for your feedback, I didn't realize there are more typography lovers on 
> this list ;)

Yep, I have spent my childhood with TeX ;-D

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