nisus.com

Hello again,

I have a problem when using justified alignment. Justifying not only changes the space between words but the spacing of each character. Look at the following example, the first paragraph is unjustified, the second justified.



Nisus changed character spacing in line 2 and 4 obvious.

Is there any workaround? Only the space between words should be changed, not the spacing of the characters.

Thanks for help
Ulrich

P.S. Frederic Goudy said: "Anyone who would letter space lower case would steal sheep" (see http://www.fonts.com/content/learning/f ... ype-crimes)

I'm afraid there's no workaround for this, we use Apple's text engine to handle justification and whatever you see is what you'll get.

One interesting thing I notice is that this seems to be font or font size dependent. Between the two e's in "eleven", for your screenshots I see an expansion of 6 points as a result of justification. In my own test using Helvetica I see an expansion of only 2 points:

My example was Verdana.

Yes, it depends on the font, the size, the style, the margin width and so on ...

Look what Apple's text machine is doing to Goudy:



Alas, poor Frederic!

The spacing problem with justified text is alleviated to some extent if you enable hyphenation (View->Hyphenation).

George Maschke wrote:The spacing problem with justified text is alleviated to some extent if you enable hyphenation (View->Hyphenation).

In my example above with the Adobe Goudy font hyphenation (normal) was enabled.

But this is not the core of the problem. Type designers spend great efforts and ingenuity for an optimal spacing of their characters. Word processors should respect that work and never make changes to it - if the user does not want it explicitly (Format > Kern). It's a typographical sin. NisusWriter Classic didn't do that. Mellel does not do it. Word always did it (I hate Word).

So in a long term either Apple has to improve his text machine (and correct by the way such silly things like hyphenation without hyphen) or Nisus has to give up Apple's text machine. Else Nisus is no choice for someone who wants a good typographical quality.