Feature request: Text alignment option: center justified

Feature requests, and in-depth discussions of features and the way Mellel works

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Do I want the "Center Justify" alignment option

Yes, I do
9
56%
Couldn't care less
4
25%
Don't know
3
19%
 
Total votes: 16

Hans-Reinhard Koch
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Feature request: Text alignment option: center justified

Post by Hans-Reinhard Koch »

In old typesetting you will find a fifth way of justification, apart from „left“, „center“, „right“ and „block justified“, where the text is block justified and the last line centered (see figure). This existed in some older Mac typesetting programs under the name „center justified“. I always miss it. It is especially nice to use in Figure legends, or in flyers and posters, where "centered" with jagged edges may look odd.
Hans-Reinhard Koch, Bonn, Germany
Reiner
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Re: Feature request: Text alignment option: center justified

Post by Reiner »

In seldom cases this would be helpful indeed.

But I would think if this option will be added to be complete also "justified, last line right" and "forced justified" (which justifies the last line too) should also be there.
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Re: Feature request: Text alignment option: center justified

Post by Mart°n »

Reiner wrote:In seldom cases this would be helpful indeed.

But I would think if this option will be added to be complete also "justified, last line right" and "forced justified" (which justifies the last line too) should also be there.
Force justified (even if it looks ugly in most cases) can be done, if you hit [SHIFT]+[RETURN] at the end of the last line of a paragraph so I’m not sure, if a separate “force justified” button is needed. As for “center justifed”, I also won’t use that on a regular basis but that would be a nice feature.
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Re: Feature request: Text alignment option: center justified

Post by Reiner »

Of course that is possible, but
1. than you have a line below the paragraph which you probably don't want.
2. a real force justified will not only force the last line, which looks ugly, but will balance the whole paragraph I think.

But as said before: of course this would be nice but there is no real need for it. Lots of other things are much more important.
Reiner
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Re: Feature request: Text alignment option: center justified

Post by Mart°n »

Reiner wrote:Of course that is possible, but
1. than you have a line below the paragraph which you probably don't want.
2. a real force justified will not only force the last line, which looks ugly, but will balance the whole paragraph I think.

But as said before: of course this would be nice but there is no real need for it. Lots of other things are much more important.
You’re right with all three points. Especially the 2nd should be a “must” if a “force justified” option will be implemented.
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Re: Feature request: Text alignment option: center justified

Post by Hans-Reinhard Koch »

Dear Reiner,
1. Center justify would be a nice option, for which I have many uses.
2. Justify with last line on the right is not needed: It's already there, when you change text direction to "right-to-left". And I see no real use for this except in text right-to-left scripts
3. Forced justify would indeed look ugly in most instances, and, as Mart°n points out, can be created with Shift-return even if adds an additional line. Force-justifying the whole block instead of the last line, on the other hand, would mean a completely new problem for programming.
So I would plead not to complicate matters too much. Because then we will probably never have it.
Center-Justify on the other hand is an option for which I see no work-around. I would be very happy to have it.
Kind regards
Hans-Reinhard
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Reiner
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Re: Feature request: Text alignment option: center justified

Post by Reiner »

Hans-Reinhard Koch wrote: 2. Justify with last line on the right is not needed: It's already there, when you change text direction to "right-to-left". And I see no real use for this except in text right-to-left scripts
I think it is a matter of personal taste if you want to set a text with the last line centred, right or justified instead of the derault left oriented last line. So change the text direction would not solve this problem if you want to do this.

It's not in my interest to complicate things, I just wanted to point out that if additions are made here, I think it would be better to make it systematically instead just adding one option when there are some on the same level.
Reiner
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Re: Feature request: Text alignment option: center justified

Post by Mart°n »

Hans-Reinhard Koch wrote: Force-justifying the whole block instead of the last line, on the other hand, would mean a completely new problem for programming.
So I would plead not to complicate matters too much. Because then we will probably never have it.


It’s not my intention to complicate things. I think the Redlers have shown their ability to pick single feature requests out of a requested pool so I don’t think that additional and maybe complex “ideas” to a single request will lead to never released, easy to implement features.
Apart from that, th „completely new problem for programming“ will come up anyways if Mellel starts to support text floating around pictures. The thing we need then is a muliline or paragraph aware typesetting engine (like InDesign) which looks at the spaces, boundaries, hyphenations and characters of the whole paragraph to finally determine the best way of typesetting that paragraph.
As this is something that will be useful in any complex layouts (multi-column, text floating around pix…) chances are higher that we will see this sooner or later in Mellel (or the separate page layout app created by the Redlers)
Hans-Reinhard Koch wrote: Center-Justify on the other hand is an option for which I see no work-around. I would be very happy to have it.
As often, Mellel offers a more or less doable workaround to achieve the optical appearance of “center justified”:

1. Write your text with “justified” appearance
2. Fully justify our second last sentence of a paragraph by manually hitting [shift]+[return]after the last word
3. Hit [return] again to really separate the last line from the paragraph
4. Select this line and change the alignment to “center”
5. Use the “Basline shift” option found in the “character appearance” palette to visually glue the centered sentence to the former paragraph (a fixed line spacing defined in “points” is a helpful option in this case)

Hopefully nobody likes to throw stones at me for publishing this workaround. Image
jannuss
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Re: Feature request: Text alignment option: center justified

Post by jannuss »

Mart°n wrote:Hopefully nobody likes to throw stones at me for publishing this workaround.
Please, Martin, please continue to publish workarounds.

There will always be some feature that is terrifically important to a very small group of people and having a solution for it truly helps.

[My favorite is the one recently requested to indent only the second line of a fully justified paragraph. The requester explained that this is the standard in the type of work he does although none of us had ever seen it.]

Janet
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Re: Feature request: Text alignment option: center justified

Post by shades »

Mart°n, I agree with Janet. I am amazed at the resourcefulness of everyone here. Well done!
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Hans-Reinhard Koch
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Re: Feature request: Text alignment option: center justified

Post by Hans-Reinhard Koch »

Thankyou, Mart°n, that's a nice one
Hans-Reinhard
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Re: Feature request: Text alignment option: center justified

Post by Ori Redler »

Hans-Reinhard Koch wrote:In old typesetting you will find a fifth way of justification, apart from „left“, „center“, „right“ and „block justified“, where the text is block justified and the last line centered (see figure). This existed in some older Mac typesetting programs under the name „center justified“. I always miss it. It is especially nice to use in Figure legends, or in flyers and posters, where "centered" with jagged edges may look odd.
Just wanted to note that this is on our suggestions list. I hope we can address this soon.
Ori Redler from RedleX
aechallu
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Re: Feature request: Text alignment option: center justified

Post by aechallu »

While I have no use for this request, I think it is arbitrary to have left justification for the last line. I think it'd be possible to implement this feature (as well as right and full justification for the last line) as a special option for a justified paragraph.

What I would not like to have, though, is "center justified" as another alignment option along with the four usual options (left, right, center, and justified). That to me would be too much complication for a rarely used feature---bloat.
Reiner
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Re: Feature request: Text alignment option: center justified

Post by Reiner »

aechallu wrote:as a special option for a justified paragraph.

What I would not like to have, though, is "center justified" as another alignment option along with the four usual options (left, right, center, and justified). That to me would be too much complication for a rarely used feature---bloat.
good suggestion imho.
Reiner
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