Tag: feature

What’s new?

Here is something I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. Since I just checked in the first version of this feature into ooo-build master, it’s probably a good time for me to talk about this.

This feature introduces a new justification option for cell text known as the “distributed justification”, where the left and right edges of the text are aligned with the left and right edges of the bounding box by adjusting space between characters (inter-character spacing), rather than space between words (inter-word spacing), across the entire width of the bounding box. This type of distributed text justification makes little sense for Latin-based languages such as English, French and German, but makes a big difference for Asian languages such as Japanese. The reason the normal justification doesn’t work for Asian languages is because, in those languages, you don’t put spaces between individual word boundaries, and the normal justification relies on presence of spaces at word boundaries. This is where the distributed justification comes into play.

This distributed justification method is commonly known as ?????? in Japanese, and is said to be one of the blockers when attempting to migrate users away from Excel to Calc.

Horizontal justification

First and foremost, I’d like to cover the horizontal justification. The following screenshot shows the difference between the three horizontal alignment modes:

As you can see, in the normal left-aligned text, the right edges of the lines are not aligned. When the text is justified, the right edges of the lines are now aligned by adjusting the inter-character spacing, except for the last line, which remains left-aligned. When the text is distributed, even the right edge of the last line becomes aligned with the right edge of the bounding box by equally distributing the characters on that line.

To allow this new justification type, I added a new justification type Distributed to the existing Cell Formatting dialog.

For the vertical alignment setting, I’ve added two new options Justified and Distributed, to support justification in the vertical direction.

Justifying Asian text mixed with Latin text

While working on this feature, I have decided to also tweak the normal justification algorithm to make it work slightly better for Asian text mixed with Latin text such as English. As I mentioned earlier, distributed justification is not really ideal for Latin text. But with the society becoming more and more global, we are seeing more and more Asian text intermixed with Latin text, and vise versa. And correctly justifying a text having mixed script types requires using different justification methods for their respective script types. After a bit of trial and error, I think I got it right. You can see the result in the following screenshot:

The English portion of the text is justified by inter-word justification, whereas the Japanese portion is justified by inter-character justification. The spaces between the English and Japanese text portions are also slightly adjusted in this scheme.

Vertical justification

Now, let’s move on to the vertical justification. When you justify a text in the vertical direction, that is, in the direction perpendicular to the direction of text flow, the spacing between the lines gets adjusted so that the top and bottom lines get aligned with their respective edges of the bounding box, like so:

The top cell shows text with default justification, while the bottom cell shows text with vertical justification.

The Cell Format dialog itself provides both Justified and Distributed options for the vertical justification setting, but they do exactly the same thing for horizontally-flowing text. For vertically-flowing text, on the other hand, they do different things, but more on that in the next section.

Justifying vertically flowing text

Now, you can also justify text even when the text is flowing vertically. There are three ways you can make the text flow vertically. You can either

1. rotate 90 degrees to the right (bottom-to-top),
2. rotate 90 degrees to the left (top-to-bottom), or
3. switch to Asian layout mode, which flows text in the top-to-bottom, right-to-left direction.

In these modes, the Justified and Distributed vertical justification options do have different effects. The following screenshot demonstrates different vertical alignment settings in three different vertical flow modes.

As an added bonus…

The code responsible for the text layout, the code where I made my modification to support this feature, is actually shared between Calc, Draw and Impress. Calc uses it to render complex cell text, while Draw and Impress use it for their text box objects. This means that, any improvement I make in this area will automatically be made available for all three applications. All that needs to be done is to simply adjust the UI in each app and add hooks in their respective import/export filters. Whether or not I’ll work on that during this cycle is another question. Having said that, I’d like to eventually get that done, and I’d like to do it sooner rather than later. But we’ll see how that goes.

But even without making the extra code change in the Draw/Impress code, my change so far was enough to fix this bug which I didn’t even know existed. :-)

Lastly…

As of this writing, I’m not entirely done with this feature yet. I still have to cover some corner cases, and I still need to fix some bugs which I unfortunately discovered while taking screenshots for this post. So, stay tuned for further fine-tuning!