"Typesetting" functions

[Thomas McGrath III]

These are all things on my wish list as well. Some are 'trickable'  
and doable but with some effort.

Tom

On Dec 16, 2005, at 6:01 AM, Sivakatirswami wrote:

> 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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Thomas J McGrath III
3mcgrath at adelphia.net

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