[Scribus] Newbie font-question

[Peter Linnell]

On Fri, 2003-08-15 at 12:35, Ralf H?ling wrote:
> Hi!
> Am Mittwoch, 30.07.03, um 16:58 Uhr (Europe/Berlin) schrieb Magnus 
> Larsson:
> >
> > Just installed scribus 1.0 on my debian 3.0 (unstable) system. The
> > program shows some of my fonts, but not all. I have MS free fonts
> > installed in /usr/share/fonts/truetype but these are not available in
> > Scribus, but in all my GTK2 applications. And when I try to add this
> > direcoty in the font preferences dialog, it does not show up. Any 
> > advice
> > on what to do?

Is /usr/share/fonts/truetype listed in the Xf86config-4 file in your
font path? 

If it is *and* the fonts are installed properly i.e. updated fonts.scale
and fonts.dir, Scribus, should find this path automatically. 
> 
> Sorry, no.
> For me it's similar. Some truetype fonts work, some don't.
> I use a Powerbook 800 with MacOS 10.2.6, X11 from apple and scribus 
> 1.0.1 installed via fink. I installed many fonts with spadmin so that 
> openoffice finds it and displays it right. Then I added the path to the 
> OO-font-directory to scribus. Now scribus finds some of the fonts, but 
> not all :-(
> 

However, many TT fonts migrated from Windows are installed with upper
case names and/or extensions i.e. .TTF  Bad.  If so, Scribus will
sometimes not find them. If not rename them to lower case and rebuild
fonts.scale and fonts.dir - in that order with ttfmkdir.

Other hints: Avoid duplicate fonts in both the X font directories and
other user-land directories, like the ones enabled in KDE etc. If you
use KDE open the startkde script to see how it works. I personally
disable it upon installing an updated KDE. 

With the latest versions of KDE 3.1.1+, I have found the Kfontinstaller
to work really well and it will, if you enable it, automatically create
.afms for all your fonts. Scribus will use these for kerning. On RH 8/9
machines it works very nicely and I rarely touch any of the command line
tools for fonts. I recommend enabling the create .afm option and it
works really well with freetype. 

Scribus is necessarily quite particular about how your fonts are
installed and configured. Not a bug - a feature IMNSHO. In the DTP world
crappy broken fonts or poor installation cause lots of problems. 

It has to so it can use advanced features in the fonts files for use
with postscript. Scribus probably extracts and uses more info from your
font files than just about any other app in Linux, besides
Kfontinstaller itself. 

Even good high quality fonts from Adobe and Bitstream can act up in
postscript. Example, last month when creating PDF of a magazine ad, some
of the text simply disappeared off the page in the PDF. The ad has not
changed in years and the font - an Adobe Type 1 has been used thousands
of times. Re-distilling the file afterwards fixed it, but I could not
see why the glyphs disappeared..   

I have come to the conclusion some of the standard fonts in Linux are
broken in the high-end postscript sense. While they work fine on an
ink-jet with CUPS and Ghostscript, some will cause RIP errors and
problems when you try to print to a high end printer like a docutech or
something with an Adobe Extreme PS3 interpreter. 

Of all the "standard" freely available fonts in Linux, the most reliable
in postscript testing I have found is the Utopia family. This Adobe Type
1 font was designed by Robert Slimbach - one of their top designers.
This was donated to Xfree86 by IBM, I think.


Hope that helps,

Peter