[scribus-dev] Fwd: Great meeting you in Saarbrücken

[Tamir Hassan]

Hi Andreas,

On 6/13/19 1:27 PM, Andreas Vox wrote:
>      > Substituting the font without reflow usually makes the document
>     useless
>      > for professional use. Scribus allows editing with substituted
>     fonts and
>      > changes them back when they become available, but text layout is
>     always
>      > done with the substituted font's metrics.
>      > Editing a document without having the used fonts available is always
>      > suboptimal and should not be encouraged. Permanently substituting
>      > missing fonts with an available one is the better choice unless
>     you have
>      > a workflow where users have  different font sets and the final
>     layout is
>      > done by someone who has all the fonts.
> 
>     Yes, that's what I was getting at. Working on a document e.g. in a
>     corporate setting with licensed corporate fonts, but together with
>     people from outside of the company. You could send them the document
>     with embedded metrics and they will be able to edit it using a
>     substitute font, and when they return it to you the typesetting will be
>     flawless again.
> 
> 
> If you embed the metrics you might as well embed the whole font.

Most commercial fonts are not licensed for (full) embedding; I am sure 
you are aware of this. I don't know whether embedding full metrics but 
no glyph outlines (this gets more complex with OpenType) for 
interoperability purposes would violate copyright or not, but the 
following (very old!) page suggests that font foundries might be 
amenable to permitting this explicitly:

https://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/Standards/PostScript/IPF.html

At any rate, most commercial font licenses permit subsetting, and with 
an incomplete set of characters and presumably incomplete metrics, a 
close estimation of the width of a text passage would be possible. There 
is enough flexibility in text typesetting to ensure that, when the final 
font is subsetted back, at least the number of lines (and possibly the 
breakpoints too) remain the same.


>      > Speaking of workflows: what kind of workflow do you want to
>     support with
>      > editable PDF? Touching up a document at the print shop? Providing
>      > collaboration between authors who use different page layout
>      > applications? Allowing to reuse an existing PDF later for a new
>     project?
>      > To me, avoiding reflow only makes sense for the first of those.
> 
>     I don't agree. My background is in research and I have often worked on
>     papers and grant applications together with other researchers. Such
>     documents often contain many figures and tables, which are often
>     floating (that's a nice optimization problem here).
> 
>     Anyway, as the document is authored and the text gradually gets closer
>     to the final version, the layout also starts to take shape, and I have
>     always edited text hand-in-hand with the layout. If I were to send the
>     document to a colleague to e.g. edit section 3 of the paper, it
>     would be
>     irritating if it would come back with sections 1-2 reformatted and lots
>     of whitespace where the text did not quite fit its allocated space.
> 
> 
> Wouldn't it be more useful to lock some pages so their layout stays fixed?

Essentially, my proposal is an extension of this concept: The widths of 
all characters in a line are also locked and only when text is added or 
removed do these characters' widths get computed. Perhaps the whole 
paragraph should then be freshly laid out, but this can be done in such 
as way as to preserve the line breaks.


-- 
Dr. Tamir Hassan
Round-Trip PDF Solutions
Research, development and consulting for the generation, analysis and 
data extraction from PDF documents

Zirkusgasse 31, 1020 Wien, Austria
www.roundtrippdf.com
tamir at tamirhassan.com
+43 676 721 6288