Libre Writer 5.1.1.3 - space correction between text words

users
#1

Hi Folks,

I’m trying to adjust spaces between characters in text words formatted
for a resume. I have the paragraph symbol turned on so I can see that
paragraph icon at the end of every line of text.

Some text words have larger spaces between the words than others. The
larger spaces make the sentences look awkward because the spaces
between the words are too large.

Other text words look appropriately close to the following word.

Is there some way to adjust this spacing between text words?

Thanks so much.

Charles.

#2

Select the text, FORMAT -> PARAGRAPH -> ALIGNMENT Tab -> OPTIONS, then put the radio button bullet on left justify.

#3

28.04.2016 u 20:24, Joe Conner je napisao/la:

Select the text, FORMAT -> PARAGRAPH -> ALIGNMENT Tab -> OPTIONS, then put the radio button bullet on left justify.

Or he could hyphenate words.

On the first word after awkward line hit Ctrl + - (ctrl and that hyphen character just right of the period/dot) at the valid brake point:

From:

Some awkward sentence.
Hyphenated first word of next sentence.

You could have:

Some awkward sentence. Hype-
nated first word of next sentence.

#4

I'm trying to adjust spaces between characters in text words formatted for a resume.

I very much hope you are not. Unless you are German and using letter spacing to indicate emphasis, you should not be tinkering with spacing between characters within words (as you clearly describe here) unless you are an expert in typography and fonts.

I have the paragraph symbol turned on so I can see that paragraph icon at the end of every line of text.

Again, this is very much what you should not be seeing. That symbol shows the end of a paragraph, so it definitely should not be appearing at the end of each line of text. Unless your message has been delayed from the second millennium, you should not be using a typewriter but a word processor, in which text within a paragraph flows naturally between lines as necessary to fit the page size and margins. If those end-of-paragraph marks show at the end of each line, you have unwisely broken your real paragraphs into separate one-line paragraphs - which will prevent the word processor doing its job effectively. The one exception to this is if the passage consists of a set of separate items each of less than a full line, as a bulleted or numbered list might do in a document such as you describe - but even then not for the whole document.

Some text words have larger spaces between the words than others. The larger spaces make the sentences look awkward because the spaces between the words are too large. Other text words look appropriately close to the following word. Is there some way to adjust this spacing between text words?

Good: you are now talking instead about spacing between words, not within words.

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.

Note that for justified text, there is an ambiguity of how the last line of a paragraph should be treated. Often this is not justified, so it will instead have standard word spacing. But it is possible to have such lines also justified, at the expense of possibly much larger word spacing - even unattractively so. If your text includes a genuine list of single-line paragraphs and you have this option selected, the line spacing may well appear strange and ugly. You can choose left alignment instead or you can disable the justification of final lines of justified paragraphs by choosing an option other than Justified for "Last line" on the Alignment tab of the Paragraph or Paragraph Style dialogue.

I trust this helps.

Brian Barker

#5

.....

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

#6

> 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".

[snip]

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

Using LM17.3 Mate. LO v5.0.3.2

Very strange here. Copy and pasted sample and set margin, text type and
text size as suggested and then did copy + paste.

Text appeared as above.

In turn tried Align left (did as expected), Align right (did as expected)
Align centre (did as expected) Justify (text remained as pasted).

zed

#7

The poster's original was one continuous paragraph which, as he said, would spread across four lines when flowed into the specified document. Somewhere in the mail transmission system or in your mail client, that single paragraph has been split into six paragraphs, which will not show the effect, of course. If you reassemble the single paragraph, you will see what he means.

Oh, and if you insert a line break (not a paragraph break) after "XXX", you will see exactly the improvement he would like to see happen by default.

Brian Barker

#8

....

Oh, and if you insert a line break (not a paragraph break) after "XXX",
you will see exactly the improvement he would like to see happen by
default.

Brian, thanks for clarifying my intent, and verifying my observation.

I'm still wondering if it's worth putting this in formally as an enhancement request -- or would it be so unlikely to get looked at that it'd not be worth the effort?

#9

Mike Scott wrote:

> ....
> >
> > Oh, and if you insert a line break (not a paragraph break) after "XXX",
> > you will see exactly the improvement he would like to see happen by
> > default.
>
>
> Brian, thanks for clarifying my intent, and verifying my observation.
>
> I'm still wondering if it's worth putting this in formally as an
> enhancement request -- or would it be so unlikely to get looked at that
> it'd not be worth the effort?
>
Do you mean the better paragraph breaking algorithm, using the whole paragraph rather than line-by-line?

I saw some discussion (or maybe just one message) on the developer's list about implementing the TeX line breaking algorithm, which does that. So it might be useful to check if such a request has already been issued.

Another thing that might help, to avoid the letterspacing, is to disable Tools > Options (LibreOffice > Preferences on Mac) > LibreOffice Writer > Compatibility > Expand word space on lines with manual line breaks in justified paragraphs. Then a manual newline at the end of such an ugly line does not justify the line.

But the best thing in my opinion (besides the TeX algorithm) would be if you could just switch off letter spacing completely. I hate it and I haven't found an option to disable it.

#10

I thank you for that info. I hate the word spacing for a fully justified "short" lines. Hopefully it works out for the original poster.

#11

zed wrote:

Mike Scott wrote:

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".

[snip]

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

Using LM17.3 Mate. LO v5.0.3.2

Very strange here. Copy and pasted sample and set margin, text type and
text size as suggested and then did copy + paste.

Text appeared as above.

In turn tried Align left (did as expected), Align right (did as expected)
Align centre (did as expected) Justify (text remained as pasted).

Having copied from email and pasted into LibreOffice, you may have ended up with a paragraph break at the end of each line from the email. Enable View > Non-printing Characters and delete any symbols which look like a backward "P", which represent paragraph breaks (except the one at the end of the last line, which you won't be able to delete anyway).

#12

Regarding Justification:

The idea that adding spacing between characters (as well as between words)
is another form of achieving full justification is, strictly speaking,
incorrect. What needs to be done is "adding additional spacing between
character CELLS." For western languages there is effectively no difference
between the two, but for languages using those scripts that permit glyphs to
be combined with other glyphs in a single character cell, it becomes
critical. (Keep in mind that, although some western language scripts (e.g.
Latin) combine things like the letter "u" and an umlaut, for instance, these
are available as single glyph combinations, making the distinction between
characters and character cells moot.

In order for more sophisticated, but still generalized, algorithms for full
justification to be implemented, it is also necessary for the underlying
"typesetting engine" to be able to properly and transparently handle text
using arbitrary combinations of scripts that are written in the same
orientation (e.g. English, Russian, and Arabic are all oriented
horizontally, even though Arabic is written right-to-left while
English/Latin and Russian/Cyrillic are written from left-to-right).

LibreOffice, as with most other competitors I've used, suffers from
fundamental underpinnings that often go back to the late 1970s;
LibreOffice's roots date back to Star in the 1980s. Most of these can be
coerced into handling two scripts (as opposed to languages) in the same
document, but become hopelessly muddled when attempting to create documents
with multiple scripts. Any improvements to paragraph-based justification
(look-ahead) built on the current code base would certainly be welcome, but
would be somewhat limited and, for some scripts/languages, not at all
useful.

Justification also becomes quite interesting when used with
scrripts/languages (e.g. Thai) that don't generally have spaces between
words at all, but use spaces to separate words.

For interesting (well, that's an acquired taste) reading about
justification, consider the following:

Knuth and Plass: 1981; This is the same Donald Knuth any good
programmer should already know.
Hochuli and Kinross: 1996;
Hàn Thé Thành: 1999; There is actually a difference between having
character edges aligned
                                        against the margin and merely
“appearing” to be aligned against the margin
                                        edges; see
http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb25-1/thanh.pdf
Haralambous and Bella: 2006;
Elyaakoubi and Lazrek: 2010; See
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jep/3336451.0013.105?view=text;rgn=main

Also, a web search for the word "Kashideh" describes a form of justification
that is specific (as far as I am aware) to languages that use the Arabic
script.

The subject of justification is also discussed on page 18 of the document
Exploring_CTL.pdf, one of a pair I attached to Bug Report 92655.

-Frank

#13

Hi :slight_smile:
To me some of this sounds like it's going into "desktop publishing" rather
than just word-processing. Writer is generally much more of a desktop
publishing than Word.

However something like Scribus or another proper desktop publishing program
might allow a lot more finesses. I've never had the patience to learn
Scribus but i found that Inkscape offered me some interesting options such
as moving letters within a word so that the gap around narrow letters (such
as "l") and wider letters (such as "w") looked more comfortable rather than
being technically correct but looking slightly wrong. To a large extent
non-monospace fonts already do that. I get the feeling that Writer
defaults to sorting out some of that issue too. I think that is one of the
many reasons Writer documents tend to look far better than ones done in
Word but a proper desktop publishing program should probably give far more
control over that process. Inkscape is really not a desktop publishing
program - it's for editing scalar-vector graphics - but my 'art' had a
couple of words in it.

Scribus is freee and OpenSource but i found it too difficult to figure-out
in the less-than-no-time i had on the rare occasions i kinda needed a DTP.
It was faster for me to stick with doing horrible kludges to force things
to work with 1 particular machine and 1 particular printer.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#14

The letter gap seems to me that you could the

     "Format/Character/Position/Spacing" option with Expand or Condense and its point variations.

I have not used that optional setting more than a few times over the past few years. Using that with the various justification options, you should be able make the lines look better.

I too do not know how to use Scribus. I use to make documents using Adobe PageMaker 7 for Windows, back in the late '90s or early '00s, just about inDesign replacing it.