Short Words

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What the Short Words Plug-in Does

Short Words for Scribus is a special plug-in for adding non-breaking spaces before or after, so called, short words.

These short words are specific to every language's typographic rules, eg. according to Czech, Polish, and Slovak typographical standards, it is not allowed to leave one letter conjunctions at line ends, if the line contains more than 25 characters. A common issue are measure and weight units, where for obvious reasons non-breaking spaces should be put in-between the preceding numbers and the units. Last but not least, there are plenty of abbreviated academic degrees, military ranks etc, which should not be separated from their owners.

Although the Scribus team cannot individually address every one of these national standards, one of the Scribus core team developers, Petr Vaněk, decided to provide Scribus users with a plug-in, that can be easily customized to meet one's specific needs.

How it Works

The screenshot below shows a sample text containing a short word before applying non-breaking spaces.

Text sample before executing Short Words:

Image:Before short words.png

The same text after applying non-breaking spaces. The red encircled word Mr jumped to the next line, because the normal space between Mr and Justice has been replaced by a non-breaking space:

Image:After short words.png

How to execute Short Words

Go to the Extras menu and choose Short Words.

Image:Shortwords.png

Your options are:

  • Selected frames: Applies non-breaking spaces to selected text frames.
  • Active page: Applies non-breaking spaces to all frames of the current page.
  • All items: Applies non-breaking spaces to the whole document.

Configuration

Short Words for Scribus provides a system wide configuration file scribus-short-words.rc, which is usually located in the $prefix/lib/scribus/plugins directory (the actual directory depends on where you or your distribution installed Scribus).

This configuration file is almost self explanatory. Basically it contains a list of short words for a given language, preceded or followed by a space and separated by commas. The position of the space, before or after a short word, indicates to the plug-in, where the non-breaking space should be put. Every line with configuration settings has to start with the language it is meant for, eg. en for English or cs for Czech:


#  English stuff START here
   en=Dr. ,Dr ,Mr. ,Mr ,Mrs. ,Mrs ,Ms. ,Ms ,Prof. ,Prof ,Rev. ,Rev ,
   en= Kg, kg, g, mg, oz, lb, cwt, km, Km, m, cm, mm,
#  Czech short words START here
## hanging conjunctions
   cs=K ,k ,S ,s ,V ,v ,Z ,z ,O ,o ,U ,u ,I ,i ,A ,
## physics and math
   cs= kg, g, m, cm, mm, l, hl, s, %,


If you want to create your own Short Words, eg. for a new language, you can create a scribus-short-words.rc yourself by using the Preferences. Just type your text into the field (it's up to you whether or not you want to remove the existing short words). Then click on the “Save” button on the right of the dialog. Reset will, unsurprisingly, restore the default settings.

Image:Shortwords-conf.png

If you successfully created a configuration file for your language, you might consider sharing your work with others by sending it to one of the Scribus developers or by posting it on the Scribus mailinglist.

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