"Typesetting" functions

Sivakatirswami katir at hindu.org
Fri Dec 16 06:01:41 EST 2005


As one who is spoiled by options for very precise control over type  
all these years (Quark and now InDesign) the challenges of making  
text look good in a Revolution field seem daunting.

I was wondering if any one had "rolled their own" typesetting  
functions. I would rather not have to create multiple flds and then  
group these with some being centered and others align left... so I  
was thinking that one could, for example, center type but getting  
some measurement of the  len(the selection) and then inserting  
something like

(an algorithm that needs real code:)

the total length of the line -(the length of type to be centered)/2 =  
(some  number of spaces to insert in front of the text)

I may be dreaming about cheddar on Mars, because I don't see from the  
docs any syntax that can provide a"real" correlation between len 
(fooString) and pixelwidth(fooString)  that can be translated back  
into a tab width or number of spaces...as the pixel width of  
fooString will vary by the charWidths of the chars in the string and  
again, this has no correlation to the width of a space... and tabs  
are out anyway, since you cannot set tabs on a per line basis. (I  
hope this is on the feature list as a bare minimum upgrade to text  
handling in the next version of rev) etc. etc. round in circles.

a typical thing one would like to be able to do, besides centering  
type on a line in a field... would be formatting like this:

someTextLeftAligned [tab or string of spaces] SomeTextRightAligned

I'm hoping some of you may have already "been there done that and yes  
it can  be done... here's how"

My actual context is rolling credits in a single field with centered  
headers for each section followed by

Correspondents

staff  country

Photographers:

photographer country

etc.

now I can center all this and it looks fairly decent if you give up  
aspirations for any more control and think "well the do it like that  
in the movies and if you don't care about things lining up its just   
fine..."  But this may not  fly when it goes up for review... or I  
will have to say "sorry, this is all we get in Rev. we have to live  
with it like this for now...

TIA

Sivakatirswami









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