Text Formatting Question

[bbtracker]

Having fun with XWD. Just completed a proto-type http://oakcreek.caunan.com after the inline frame issue was resolved with assistance from John and Sledger. Comments and suggestions are always welcome.

My next question. I noticed that the 'Justify' in the text formatting is missing. Is there a reason for not including that with XWD? I believe all the other similar applications that I have been using has that functionality/feature.

Thank you, guys (and gals) for all your help.

Conrado
http://caunanheritage.com

[covoxer]

I noticed that the 'Justify' in the text formatting is missing. Is there a reason for not including that with XWD?

Yes, it is missing in this version of WD due to some technical problems with WYSIWYG representation of the justified text in html. We hope to solve them in future.

[Charles Moir]

Justified text is a good example of an area where browsers are very poor - (it wasn't supported at all by some browsers until relatively recently). But now each browser implements justified text it a different way - you have no control over the lines wrap positions, and so there was not predictability or consistency across browsers. Bottom line, there was just no way we could provide accurate WYSIWYG justified text. And since that was a key criteria of the product we could not support justified text.

As John says we're still working on it - and one day we can hope that browsers or the W3C specs will tighten up so that we can achieve a degree of consistency across all browsers.

[bbtracker]

I created these sites:

http://siteinprocess.caunan.com
http://pamsnj.org

with a 'drag & drop' or 'cut & paste' web builder tool. Tried viewing them with 5 major browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Flock. They all seem to behave normally; displaying the justified text properly and all the same way.

I was really impressed (at least initially) with XWD and was thinking of converting said sites to XWD, plus all my existing ones. But without this feature, I am now hesitant to do that.

Maybe we could convince the XWD developers, since they are already aware of the issue and apparently working on it, to bring the justify text up to the top of their 'To Do' list.

I am not trying to stir something here. It's just my style and the feature is a must for me. And my clients like it too.

Conrado

[covoxer]

It's not on the To Do list but actually on the To Fix list.
We had Justified export in XXP4 but it was not satisfactory.
Comparison with other software here is irrelevant because it uses different approaches and gives different possibilities. For example, we have to combine justified export with precise line positioning since we have very precise line spacing setting in the program. But browsers do not support it to this level of precision. They also render lines with slightly different spacing. Though you may not notice this on simple designs, inserting large paragraphs of text can overflow the graphics. Another features not supported by browsers/HTML/CSS/drug&drop editors are free text repelling and fully functional tab stops (like you have in text processors).
Nevertheless, we are looking for the way to implement it with all the functionality in future versions.

[bbtracker]

Thanks, John. Now, I fully understand what's involved in this issue. I'll eagerly await for the next version.

Conrado

[gwpriester]

You get a lot of wind there, I assume.

[bbtracker]

There are times that it is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.

Conrado

[StevenWWinters]

Justified text is a good example of an area where browsers are very poor

For me, close enough has been good enough, in a world where cross browser / cross platform compatibility has been a night mare. I regularly use justified text and hope it quickly finds its way into XWD...

[slavelle]

I have this need in some of my site designs as well, so I'd love to see it implemented.

For what it's worth, if you create a text object with full justification in Xtreme 4.0 and then copy that object into XWD, it will genereate a warning error about the justified text, but it will use it and (at least in the preview window) the justification is in effect. This may be an acceptable workaround for those who already have xtreme and need justification at "close enough".

Hope that helps.