On 11/11/2009 01:58 PM, Maumau wrote: > Scribus shows me how many characters there. I need to know how many > characters fit in the text box. > I have done something like this for a script. What it amounted to was an approximation, based on some kind of average letter size. What I was doing was creating a single-line text frame, with the length calculated on the basis of the number of characters, so I created a formula for this based on experimentation.
Probably better than using standard lorem ipsum would be to use a sample text from your language. Let's imagine you have a 150 pt by 300 pt frame. Choose a suitable font at the size you wish, with the linespacing you wish, enter some various passages of sample text, then take the average character count for several trials. You might try varying the font, varying the size, linespacing, other features, to see how these impact the character count. You could also get more sophisticated, by not just counting letters but noting which particular letters are contained in the text and adjusting according to character widths. In the end, it depends on your purpose and what your demands are. Is it to squeeze the maximum number of characters in a frame? Is it to adjust the size of an automatically created frame? Is it to decide the placement of different sized blocks of text in a columns format? Or something else? These will determine how much time you wish to spend on these kinds of diversions. Greg
