Re: [office-comment] RFE: Vertical justification

[Alex Hudson <home@alexhudson.com>]

On Sat, 2007-04-21 at 13:46 +0200, Thomas Zander wrote:
> On Saturday 21 April 2007 12:42, Alex Hudson wrote:
> > So, although you can come close with the solution you outline, it's not
> > at all the same thing. For people who would use this functionality, the
> > layout of the text is very important, and they would not be willing to
> > snap the lines to a grid.
> 
> The concept of a baseline grid is an invention that has very very long 
> been correct typographical layout.
> The kind of people that find text layout very important will much more 
> likely want to follow that known (and supported) feature then the one you 
> invented.

While I would love to take credit for "inventing" this, the reason I'm
asking for this feature is because a publishing house asked for this
feature. Their DTP suite does is able to do a number of layouts which
are required in their field, and this was one of the only ones that is
currently unsupportable in OpenDocument.

Baseline grid is a useful feature, but it doesn't help this use case.
Justifying text vertically by making it sit on a grid and inserting
blank lines is like justifying horizontally by using a monospace font
and inserting spaces. In some instances, that might be what you want,
but it's a different layout.

Now, we've established that OpenDocument currently can't achieve this
layout. Rather than being told that we don't need the feature, I would
appreciate a discussion of to what extent this could be implemented.

Thanks,

Alex.