Dear list: In summary: What is the best way to horizontally move the leftmost character of a line of text in a text-frame?
background, for those who want to know more detail: Making a book, trying to make it nice. The main text is printed in 16pt. The first letters of each chapter are styled as Initial Caps in 36pt. (What is the singular of Initial Caps?) Text is aligned as Justified, even using the Optical Margins feature on both sides. I am using it for the first time and I like that optical trick. Now our Initial Caps, being very big, are showing a too wide distance from the left text-frame border. It is very ugly for example on a capital E. I believe the gap is caused by the inbuilt values of the characters for each specific font. I need to hack it, to align better. I know how to move each letter horizontally, using Advanced Settings and the Manual Tracking tool: I just place the cursor left of my patient and then click the arrows until I am happy. But I have not managed to move the leftmost character of a line, neither by placing the cursor to the very left, nor by selecting the character. (Guess what: I can move the second character of a line easily, even on top of the first character; or even sooo far left, that it will leave the text-frame altogether! So the text-frame border is not some "impossible" barrier.) My workaround this morning was to place a Zero Width Space (U+200B) left of my Initial Cap and thereby making the Cap the second letter in that line. And then moving it by Manual Tracking tool all the way to the left border of my text frame, to align with all the other lines of main copy. My workaround feels to me like a bad hack. Using invisible spaces will later confuse some other team member who maybe needs to prepare a second print run or whatever. Especially since Scribus does not show any Control Characters for any spaces except for the "normal" default space U+0020. (I will write a feature request for more visual Control Characters soon in a separate mail.) for those still reading and wanting the full, ugly, truth: Our style is set such that each paragraph starts with a First Line Indent (6,5mm). But we are finding those indents very ugly on the very first lines of entire new blocks of text, i.e. after a full blank line, where a major new subject is starting. (Many books from D, NL, A are beginning a new full block of text without a first line indent.) Since we do not have style settings to distinguish minor-paragraph-first-line and major-paragraph-first-line, my workaround is to have just one real paragraph marker to make an empty line. And then to use a new-line rather than a paragraph-marker to start our text. That way the first line of visible text does not consider itself a First Line and does not make any indent. (The indent is happening in the blank line between two paragraphs, where only the (invisible) paragraph-marker is indented by 6,5mm. This extra complication does not affect - I believe - my inability to move the first character of any line horizontally. I cannot move any first characters even within testing text-frames with Lorem Ipsum and with Scribus-default-paragraph-style. How are other users doing Initial Cap left-alignment for their books, please? thanks, Martin -- ZASKE Martin responsable G?G? BP 50 - Bassila - B?nin tel G?G? 66.66.11.11 tel pers 97.44.62.95
