Great idea for easy typesetting feature

[JohnWasilewski]

Sometimes, when I want a document to look very smart, I spend a lot of time with multi-line titles, headings, captions, headers, footers, any text boxes, sometimes with last lines of paragraphs. and so on, fiddling with character pitch, letter spacing, 'leading,' and so on, to try to give blocks of text straight vertical sides. Sometimes, I might even increase or reduce the font size by half a point, or change to a narrower or wider version of the same font, where those exist.
Here's an example:

Typesetting example.docx

(12.88 KiB) Downloaded 454 times

It would be great if a feature was available that could do this for us. A good name for it would be 'Typesetting', or 'Leading,' but SoftMaker may have a better one.

I'd like to be able to select a string of text, then click an icon or pull down a menu item to display a small tool, with a width-adjusting function that can stretch or compact the selected string according to user input. I can envisage doing this with the mouse wheel, with arrow keys or with a slider, but, again, the SoftMaker team would have a better idea. What I would find rather brilliant would be if a Ctrl-Keyhold-mousewheel action could do it instantly, just as Ctrl-mousewheel already zooms a document

'Settings' or else the tool itself, might need (1) a sensitivity adjuster, to facilitate fine adjustment when using the mouse wheel or a slider tool, and (2) a tick-box for whether to allow font size changes, with upper and lower bound settings for letter spacing and character pitch, which, when reached, would trigger a .05pt font-size increment.

I do hope people like this idea.

[JohnWasilewski]

Sometimes, when I want a document to look very smart, I spend a lot of time with multi-line titles, headings, captions, headers, footers, any text boxes, sometimes with last lines of paragraphs. and so on, fiddling with character pitch, letter spacing, 'leading,' and so on, to try to give blocks of text straight vertical sides. Sometimes, I might even increase or reduce the font size by half a point, or change to a narrower or wider version of the same font, where those exist.
Here's an example:

Typesetting example.docx

(12.88 KiB) Downloaded 408 times

It would be great if a feature was available that could do this for us. A good name for it would be 'Typesetting', or 'Leading,' but SoftMaker may have a better one.

I'd like to be able to select a string of text, then click an icon or pull down a menu item to display a small tool, with a width-adjusting function that can stretch or compact the selected string according to user input. I can envisage doing this with the mouse wheel, with arrow keys or with a slider, but, again, the SoftMaker team would have a better idea. What I would find rather brilliant would be if a Ctrl-Keyhold-mousewheel action could do it instantly, just as Ctrl-mousewheel already zooms a document

'Settings' or else the tool itself, might need (1) a sensitivity adjuster, to facilitate fine adjustment when using the mouse wheel or a slider tool, and (2) a tick-box for whether to allow font size changes, with upper and lower bound settings for letter spacing and character pitch, which, when reached, would trigger a .05pt font-size increment.

I do hope people like this idea.

[Woody44]

Professional book designers wrestle with this, even in their professional layout programs such as Adobe InDesign. The problem with trying to automate it is that the results may (and likely will) be ugly and unacceptable.

The steps you have described, such as adjusting text pitch and spacing, are what I use. Fine-tuning text in this way is (in my experience) generally only needed for things such as title pages, so it's not a big deal when you have to do it. I wouldn't bother for chapter headings, and for body text simple choosing fully justified takes care if it.

Have you tried putting your blocks of test in a text box and setting the justification to "full"? You can then tinker with it by just adjusting the width of the text box.

I don't stretch or shrink fonts. Maybe I'm more attuned to it than most, but I find it easy to see when the characters on one line are proportioned differently than those on other lines, and I find it to be extremely distracting. Stick to adjusting character spacing and kerning.

[SuperTech]

Thanks for your suggestion. I have forwarded this as an improvement suggestion to our product management...