Text justification and formatting overview

Build 1501 on 14/Nov/2017  This topic last edited on: 24/Oct/2016, at 14:39

The text justification in GN4 is coherent across all GN4 modules (i.e., Ted4, Fred4 and GN4 browser use the same text justification and hyphenation engine).

The text justification is single-line based, thus computed for each line separately.

You can tune the way the text justification works by enabling or disabling letter spacing, selecting the best method of line spacing, and deciding how to handle overfull lines. See Justification defaults overview.

hmtoggle_plus1About single-line and multi-line based justification

Miles 33 considers a single-line method more suitable and straightforward than multi-line composing, especially when editing text to fit.

The multi-line composing (not available in GN4) often causes troubles in text which is one line underset or overset - while you are editing longer paragraphs to bring text in measure, it may suddenly become too short or too long for two or three lines (that's because entire paragraph is recomposed).
hmtoggle_plus1Formatting

The text formatting in the GN4 is based on the TERA proprietary typographical language (GN markup language, shorter 'GNML'). GNML features built-in tags and variables, fixed and variable styles, formatting defaults, style libraries and formats, and custom XML tags, defined in the XML schema GN4.XML.

The basic blocks of this structure are two languages (GNML and XML), set of GN4 types (defining body, head, photo etc), and XML schema (defining XML elements and attributes).

GNML language consists of 74 typographical tags and number of typographical variables. You can combine them into custom tags and styles. Custom tags and styles are stored in the style libraries, and you can optionally add them custom XML tags. During installation phase, you will create as many style libraries and styles as you want. GN4 style libraries are linked then to GN4 formats, and formats are assigned to GN4 types, defined in the XML schema. See also GNML language structure.

During text editing, users assign GN4 formats to text elements (in Ted4 or Fred4). In this way, all the styles, defined in all the libraries linked to format, are available in such texts. Users apply styles on text (and this embeds tags in text). On each text justification, embedded tags are re-interpreted (GN4 reads typographic attributes from style libraries). This justifies text and rebuilds WYSIWYG/page view.

In Web publishing, text is exported as XML, and templates and style sheets are applied to format Web pages.