Has the typography improved? [LWN.net]

Has the typography improved?

Posted Feb 16, 2012 10:38 UTC (Thu) by jch (guest, #51929)
Parent article: Scribus 1.4.0 released

The last time I tried Scribus, I gave up because of the primitive typography — the justification algorithm was unable to make good use of narrow frames, there was no support for automatically substituting fi and fl ligatures, and there was no italic correction. Having been trained to notice such flaws by the TeX geeks, I found it difficult to accept them in my own documents.

Has the typography support improved in 1.4?

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Has the typography improved?

Posted Feb 16, 2012 12:52 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

That's the problem with TeX – once you're used to the quality it can produce, nothing else will make you happy.

The sad thing is that the algorithms behind TeX have been extensively documented for nearly 30 years now, but even so people insist on coming up with their own inferior methods for doing things like line breaking.

Has the typography improved?

Posted Feb 17, 2012 9:43 UTC (Fri) by job (guest, #670) [Link]

The line breaking algorithm of TeX is well known in the literature, and you will surely find it under the hood of the most well-known proprietary DTP products. You can do really good looking things with Indesign or Quark too. TeX is just a bit more automatic as long as you match the use case.

Has the typography improved?

Posted Mar 1, 2012 13:22 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Quite. Look at the Kindle's line-breaking 'algorithm' and weep -- it doesn't even know that it can break on hyphens, and there is no attempt to understand greyness at all. And, because it's closed-source, I can't fix this (there is one replacement OS that fixes it, but all its documentation is in Chinese, its user interface has a broken English translation and is worse than the Kindle's native one in almost all other ways, and its source is not available so we can't fix that either...)