Odd line spacing

users
#1

When I type a line with italics in it the line spacing seems to
change. At the moment the page is set to proportional 100% and the
font size is 12 pt for all characters on the line. With only "normal"
characters the lines are evenly spaced and the page looks nice.

When there is italics within the text, additional space appears above
and/or below the line so the lines are no longer evenly spaced. The
effect is to have a rather ragged page layout.

What it "looks like" is if LibreOffice has taken the outer boundary of
the character area and rotated it to create the italic effect and the
corners of the boundary have pushed the adjacent line up (or down or
both). Probably not that but that is the visual effect. Setting the
size of the italic characters to 11 pt makes everything look right
again. The effect carries through to pdf files generated from the
.odt editor files.

A friend who has a different version of LibreOffice (an older one) has
been able to take my .odt files and convert to .pdf without having
this effect.

The font I am using (Garamond Pro) has an italic file included with it
although I can't prove that it is being used.

Can anyone suggest how I caused this and what I should do to fix it?

LibreOffice 6.1.3.2 running on Fedora 32 Workstation edition.

Regards,

John

#2

John,

I saw the problem when I tried to superscript. As far as I could tell,
there is no concept of "baseline" grid that text returns to... once you get
off the grid for whatever reason, it affects everything.

In order to work around this, I did 3 things:

1. I forced the entire document onto a grid: enabling 'Register-true' for
every style (all 500ish of them.) they all register to 'm', except the
footnote set which registers to 'f'.

2. I also use a specific line spacing and not a percent or preset. I also
use only actual italic faces and not libreoffice created faces.

3. I also match the actual height of various styles within each document so
that the height of x and X are the same for all fonts by managing the
height with scaling factors. Libreoffice only has Y scaling as a function
of superscript so to match fonts most of my styles declare themselves
"superscript" then scale by a few percent.

Some examples are here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1yzjUqTzvui4l8mYjTiF-t1qjxZ4gpxCi?usp=sharing

I think all the fonts in these templates are available from Google Drive,
but possibly you'll have to find some from other places... they're all open
licensed fonts.

#3

Thank you Michael.

It just seems so bizarre since as a rule LibreOffice turns out very
nicely formatted text. This page presentation is at least rather
jarring and looks unprofessional.

Thanks for the suggestions; I'll try them in the morning when I have
some time to play with the setup. The fonts should be from the font
supplier (Soft Maker) and not created by LibreOffice but there is
probably no way to make sure that is so. All I can say for sure is
that the italics does appear as an option on the font selection list.

Regards,

John

#4

What are the parameters for Italics at ">Styles >Character Styles >Italics?

Adjust that to Garamond Pro Italics, and see what happens.

jonathon

#5

Interestingly, that combination doesn't exist on the drop down menus.

The "styles" drop down has a whole list of radio buttons but clicking
any of them just causes the drop down to close without any action. The
button selected is "Default Character".

The "Format | Character" drop down under font has "Family", "Style"
and "Size" and these are set to (when the cursor is on an italics
word) "Garamond Pro", "Italic" and "12" which is about what I would
expect. It doesn't specifically show the Garamond Pro Italics font as
being in use and there is no option to change it.

FYI, I am using the default style template.

Regards,

John