Line space does not work

[Mark S]

Using Inkscape 0.92.1 r15371 on Debian Stretch

Steps to create bug:
I create a new document. I draw a text frame and paste some plain text from Mousepad. Inkscape defaults to an absolutely insane line height spacing. I try everything I can think of in Inkscape to set the line height to something sane but it's no good, the line spacing just won't work.

(I'm so disillusioned with .92 over many other things that I wonder if anyone can help me to install Inkscape .48 on Debian Stretch? On my old machine running Debian Wheezy with Inkscape .48 everything's great.)

[Eman Modnar (eman-mod)]

I set default line spacing units to percents and this works for me. Click on the Text tool when nothing is selected and then set line spacing to e.g. 150%. After that when you'll create a new text your line spacing will be dependent on font size you select.

Percents, 'em' and 'ex' are "relative" units which depend on font size, other units like 'pt', 'mm', 'px' are "absolute" so line height has absolute value which doesn't change with font size.

[Mark S (zarg-)]

Thanks for your reply Eman, (random name, that, btw ;-) but that does not work for me. In a fresh new document, I did as you suggested and set line spacing to 125%. Then I drew a text frame and pasted text. This looked okay at the default font size of 30pt, and I thought the problem might be solved, but no. When I then selected the text and changed the font size to 10pt, the line spacing did not follow with it proportionally but instead remained at the massive line space from the 30pt setting. Changing the line spacing - even down to the crazy 0% - did not help at all.

If anyone can help me get rid of .92 and get the frankly far superior version .48 working on my Debian Stretch machine I'd be very grateful.

[TylerDurden (8thrule)]

Perhaps you can share an example file.

In the meantime, here are some notes on line spacing in Inkscape 0.92.
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/0.92#Line_Spacing

TD

[Eman Modnar (eman-mod)]

Mark, this really sounds like a bug, but I personally cannot reproduce it on Linux with 0.92.1 nor with trunk version. What happens with units when you change font size to 10pt? Does they remain 'percents' or maybe change to something else? Have you tried to paste a text from another source?

[Mark S (zarg-)]

Thanks for your reply Eman, (random name, that, btw ;-) but that does not work for me. In a fresh new document, I did as you suggested and set line spacing to 125%. Then I drew a text frame and pasted text. This looked okay at the default font size of 30pt, and I thought the problem might be solved, but no. When I then selected the text and changed the font size to 10pt, the line spacing did not follow with it proportionally but instead remained at the massive line space from the 30pt setting. Changing the line spacing - even down to the crazy 0% - did not help at all.

If anyone can help me get rid of .92 and get the frankly far superior version .48 working on my Debian Stretch machine I'd be very grateful.

[Jared Henley (jared-henley)]

I think I am also experiencing this bug, but it's also mixed up with #1663075 https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/1663075.

If I create a new document in 0.92.1 (ArchLinux), things look pretty good at large font sizes. But I'm doing some work at 5pt, and it's clear that even with 0 line spacing (any unit), the line spacing is not 0. Seems like there's some kind of offset involved (but I'm getting a different offset in different documents). With mm line spacing, there's the same offset on top of what's specified.

Attached is a drawing and some screenshots demonstrating the above.

Mark, I can understand why you want to get back to 0.48. Unfortunately I can't help, but I do trust that Inkscape is changing for the better - 0.91 to 0.92 looks like a bug change under the GUI, the magnitude isn't reflected in the version number.

[Jared Henley (jared-henley)]

Pity I can't edit the last comment. "a bug change" should be "a big change"

[Jared Henley (jared-henley)]

Actually, after more work with .92, it seems like there's no bug here. It's the interaction between the outer element and inner element line spacings that's doing this. I can't say I've totally grokked it, but it's getting easier.

This http://tavmjong.free.fr/blog/?p=1632 is particularly informative.

[Alex Bigelow (yasashiku)]

I'm getting issues with this as well... it seems like there's some kind of internal constraint that doesn't allow leading below 1.0 to be applied.

Perusing the wiki (http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Line_Height_Bugs) it sounds like there's some kind of "strut" idea for preventing lines from overlapping, based on the font size?

I don't know enough about Inkscape's codebase or the details of CSS/SVG specs to comment about conforming to line-height behavior... in practice, everything I've seen uses TSPAN elements and the dy attribute instead of line-height to control leading.

FWIW, Illustrator totally allows line overlap, and designers do it all the time. IMO, enforcing some kind of distance between lines to prevent overlap is a *serious* flaw that makes Inkscape essentially unusable (I mostly work with type, and the current minimum distance looks awful in almost every application)... I have to manually create separate text elements for every line in order to make text look decent.

[TylerDurden (8thrule)]

Lines can most certainly overlap.

screen recording:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/dflteowidv3eftl/2017-12-18_15-07-19.gif?dl=0
(No need to sign-up for db, just dismiss any popups.)

Note the button for outer element is active.

Maybe you have seen these notes:
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/0.92#Line_Spacing

TD

[Windell Oskay (windell)]

I have this problem as well on Mac. Starting with a brand new document, I'm unable to text with a reasonable line spacing or (apparently) adjust the line spacing. This works perfectly fine on Windows.

As far as I can tell, Inkscape 0.92.x is unusable for text, at least on some computers. I'm not sure if it's all Macs or just me, though.

[Ulrike Uhlig (u-d)]

Affected by this in 0.92 on Debian Stretch too. The problem seems to bit a bit erratic, I've seen line-height work in approx. 5% of cases, but only using centimeters.

[Ulrike Uhlig (u-d)]

When I start Inkscape from the terminal, select a text and try to set its line-height, I see the following output in the terminal:

** (inkscape:25034): WARNING **: Couldn't find row for style: Normal (name of font)

[anuszka (ochab)]

I am experiencing this bug, too. (Kubuntu 17.10, Inkscape 0.92.2 (5c3e80d, 2017-08-06))

How to reproduce it:

1. Open a new document.
2. Create a text field.
3. Type a few lines of text with a default font size (it was 30 in my case) and a default line spacing (it was 125%).
4. Select the text.
5. Change the font size for the selected text to a much smaller value (I set it to 8).

--> Result: You will see that the line spacing does not change. The value of line spacing still shows 125% but it is not true.

6. Now try to change the line spacing to 1%.

--> Result: The line spacing only decreases a little bit. But for sure, it is not 1% of font height.

7. Now try to click several times in the "^" button next to the line spacing value window. In this way, you want to change the line spacing value by +1 %.

--> Result: The values in the window begin to change very quickly and you loose control over it -- you can't stop it. In my case, it stopped at 1000%.

8. Changing units does not help.

[Dana Brimmer (biobrimm)]

I think I figured it out after reading about line spacing here: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/0.92#Line_Spacing, but didn't really find anyone clearly answering online so I thought I would share.

You need to make sure you are adjusting the "Outer Style" of your text. To do that you click the icon next to the font size drop down to highlight the icon. This should cause the font size to being showing you the font size of the "Outer Style" which will (frustratingly) still be at 30. Once the icon is highlighted, change your font size, and the spacing should be fixed.

[idovecer (igor-dovecer)]

This is the real solution for this BUG, Inkscape version 0.92.3:

1. Always create text smaller than you actually need (if you need for example 8pt txt, create 4pt, or even 2pt text in size).

2. Type your text

3. Try to change line height, you can change it to UP, but not to make space between text smaller

4. Select all text, now change all text from 2pt (or 4pt) to 8pt

5. Try now to change text spacing, it works :).

Please confirm if it works for you too.

[Jared Henley (jared-henley)]

You're on the right track idovecer. The real trick is to ensure that the size of the outer (container) text element is the same size or smaller than the inner text.

There's an icon (looks like two letter T in a box on my system) to the left of the font size. When this is clicked in, you are looking at the outer text element. Ensure that the font size here is less than or equal to the font size you actually want. Then the TT button is clicked out, you can adjust the line spacing to your heart's content and it will work.