Re: Features needed for high-end DTP apps

[Damon Chaplin <damon kendo fsnet co uk>]

On Sun, 2002-10-20 at 21:09, Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
> Joaquín Cuenca Abela <cuenca pacaterie u-psud fr> writes:
> 
> > On Sun, 2002-10-20 at 17:20, Owen Taylor wrote:
> > > 
> > > Other than speed consideratons, TeX line breaking is unsuitable
> > > for interactive apps because it is very disconcerting to the user
> > > to have parts of the paragraph before the cursor changing as
> > > you edit.
> > 
> > I don't quite agree, here.  When I used InDesign 2 it didn't looked
> > "very disconcerting".
> > 
> > Most of the time, new characters don't change previous line breaks, so
> > overall it works in a pretty intuitive way.
> 
> I'm basing my comment on the using the editor in Chris Lahey's 'go', 
> which used libhnj. It may be that InDesign does something a bit more
> sophisticated.

We could do something similar to how Quark does forced alignment. When
you are initially typing in the paragraph, it just uses normal justified
alignment, but when you hit Return to end the paragraph it switches over
to forced alignment (i.e. the last line spreads out to fill the line).
The paragraph then keeps its forced alignment, even when you edit it
again.

In our case, we could do simple line-breaking (i.e. break at the first
available place) while you are editing, and switch over to fancy
TeX-like line-breaking when you finish the paragraph.

I've read the TeX algorithm and I'm now thinking of trying to hack Pango
to do simple 1-paragraph hyphenation & justification using it. We could
then move on to more complex multi-paragraph/page layout issues.

Damon

PS. You still haven't said if you want all this stuff in Pango!