full justification for flowted text

[Frederik Elwert]

The new text tool is just great! But I think it would be
even better if it would support justifying via the GUI. One
step towards that could be using the text-align property
instead of text-anchor, because text-anchor overrides
manually added text-align:justify. Best would of course
be implementing it into the text properties dialogue.

[Buliabyak-users (buliabyak-users)]

I think this works to some extent - cyreve, can you comment?

[Richard Hughes (cyreve)]

freedo is pretty much correct: both text-anchor and text-align
are read, and the 'lowest' one in the cascade is obeyed. If
they both exist at the same level then text-anchor takes
precedence because it's the only one mentioned in the svg 1.
1 spec.

He raises a good point, however, that with this behaviour it's
not possible for us to be sensibly backwards compatible. The
svg 1.2 spec (the old one that uses flowroot) does describe
text-align but does not describe text-anchor, thus I think that
the right thing to do would be to only set text-align on flowroot
and only set text-anchor on text. However, this is
unnecessarily awkward and might cause confusion, so I
favour setting both on both and swapping round the
precedence.

His request for a UI to set full justification is, of course, very
much valid.

[Frederik Elwert (frederik-elwert)]

If I get things right, the 1.2 spec will have the text-anchor
property. The current SVG-T 1.2 draft describes it for the text
element: <http://www.w3.org/TR/SVGMobile12/text.
html#TextAlignmentProperties> (But I'm not sure if this really
was your point). In the long run I'd really prefer your suggestion
to use text-anchor for simple text and text-align for flowed text
because this would be the clearest solution, in my opinion.

[Bug Importer (bug-importer)]

-I'm not a programmer just a power-user- so basically I
understood less than half of these comments, the place for
my comment is to accent the priority of this feature (that the
text paragraph can be justified)

[Peter Lewerin (vermeil-deactivatedaccount)]

AFAICT this request has been fulfilled in later versions.

If no one objects, I will close this request as invalid soon.

[baxissimo (wbaxter)]

Looks fixed to me.
It works in the snapshot I have from Sept 2008. Might have been fixed much sooner.

I do have some niggles with it, like it's handling of spaces in a bullet list. There maybe needs to be a way to create a locked, fixed width space. Like for instance ctrl-shift-space makes a non-breaking non-expanding in MS Word. Something like that would be nice. But those thing should be filed separately. This request has been satisfied.

[Joe Smith (yasumoto7)]

Definitely not fixed in either the repos (0.46ubuntu2) or the latest nightly source.

[Kris (kris-degussem)]

Is not this correctly working in current trunk?

[su_v (suv-lp)]

> Is not this correctly working in current trunk?

Yes.Support for full justification for flowed text had been added back in Inkscape 0.42 (2005-07-25):
«Several new text styles are supported but don’t yet have a UI for setting them: text-align:justify, word-spacing, textpath startOffset, block-progression:lr. »
<http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/0.42#Text>

In Inkscape 0.44 (2006-06-23), the GUI for text alignment had been added:
«This version adds the beginnings of a Controls Bar for the Text tool (previously empty). Now you can select the font family, size, apply bold and italic styles, change alignment and text orientation without opening the Text and Font dialog.»
<http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/0.44#Controls_bar_for_the_Text_tool>

Note that regular, non-flowed text cannot be fully justified, neither in current stable nor trunk (I assume that comment #7 confused the two types of text). Full justification (left and right) is only available for flowed text:
<http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Text-Formatting.html#Text-Formatting-Justification>

Closing as 'Fix Released'.