RFE: Vertical justification

[Alex Hudson <home@alexhudson.com>]

Hi,

Onsite with a customer yesterday, we came across a text document
requirement they have which OpenDocument currently doesn't appear to be
able to meet - I've been through the v1.1 specification, but I haven't
been able to look through all the proposals for v1.2, so perhaps this is
already being addressed. It might be I've missed something, though.

The main requirement is the ability to justify the contents of the page
vertically, such that the page content starts at the top margin and
finishes at the bottom margin. Without such justification, there is
uneven whitespace at the bottom of every page between the end of the
page content and the bottom page margin.

I envisage this being a page style: it should be a feature which doesn't
alter pagination in any way; it simple increases vertical spaces
elsewhere on the page to ensure there is no space at the bottom of the
page. This is much like horizontal justification, where space is
increased between words to ensure the last word of a line finishes
against the right margin.

Ideally, it would include:

      * the ability to mark a page style as being vertically justified;
      * the ability to turn this off before a manual break;
      * the ability to ask that this happen only when the page ends
        within some measure (say, 1 inch) of the bottom border (so that
        a page only half full is not filled with large vertical white
        spaces in order to justify it);
      * the ability to ask that the space be moved elsewhere on the page
        under the following schemes:
             1. by proportionally increasing the spaces between
                paragraphs;
             2. by proportionally increasing the line leading;
             3. by increasing space at manually marked positions,
                possibly in some ratio (e.g., being able to mark before
                a heading and after a table, and asking that 70% of the
                space required be inserted before the heading, and the
                remaining 30% be inserted after a table), or:
             4. by being able to specify within styles to what extra
                space may be added above and below in order to justify,
                and where to prefer to put the space. (e.g., we first
                add space Headings up to 0.5in, at which point we then
                add space to text paragraphs). This would perhaps be an
                alternative feature in preference to 3.

Obviously, that's a lot of configurability, particularly item 3 or 4,
and a good initial start might be to include a vertical justification
system which simply increases spacing between paragraphs. And there is
extra complexity where e.g., columns are involved.

This is actually a very common requirement for them, which I believe is
usual practice in their sector in terms of presentation, but I think
this is also widely useful in general. 

Many thanks,

Alex Hudson.