Why is there so much whitespace when using full- or forced justification?

The quick answer is: Hyphenation. Hyphenation in combination with (Full/Forced) justification may yield a lot of whitespaces between words, especially in foreign languages. The actual reason for this excessive appearance of white-space seems to be that the default hyphenation dictionary is not extensive enough (in non-english languages at least) to ensure maximum use of words within a line (thus correct hyphenation). Of course one can use the Smart Hyphen functionality built within Scribus to manually improve the result, but this is a lot of work since each exception needs to be addressed, again-and-again. By improving the dictionary itself, this probably can be avoided almost completely.

Currently the default Hyphenation dictionaries, especially for foreign languages, need further improving. Perhaps it would be a good idea to create an interface for this, so non-programmers can help with improving these dictionaries.

--Nhoijtink 08:02, 11 February 2008 (CET)