[Scribus] Re: SCRIBUS crash when INSERTING pages & Fonts

[Peter Linnell]

<snip>
> I think this has something to do with Mandrake because my laptop does
> the same thing and I have Mandrake 9.1 on it.  But SuSE Linux 8.2 and
> Red Hat 9 work fine. A problem with Red Hat 9 is that the fonts and
> Scribus interface looks malformed.

There have been a few messages about problems with Mandrake's version on
Qt packages. For optimal performance with Scribus, you are recommended
to compile Qt from source. You can have more than one version of QT
installed. It is simply a matter of setting environment variables to
allow them to coexist.

As for RH9, I have been doing a lot of testing and experimentation to
get the best font rendering etc. What you are seeing is a conflict
between the way RH has patched Qt to support Xft2 and the way that
Scribus accesses fonts. There are also some "broken" in the sense of
correct postscript output fonts in RH. 

I will have *very* detailed instructions posted very shortly. In sum:

Get all the QT and KDE packages from http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net/

Preferably, rebuild at least the Qt source rpms for your platform i.e.
set the rpmmacros for your CPU. 

These packages integrate very nicely with the rest of RH and re-enable
many useful KDE features - like Kpackage and Kfontinstaller to name two.
This enables the Kfontinstaller to do some magic to the fonts.scale and
fonts.dir files. 

Make sure all font names are in lower case. 

Get the Ghostscript 7.07 rpms as well. They have a bunch of bug fixes, 
add the latest ijs drivers and re-enable the shared gs library too. 


> A problem that I still have on SuSE 8.2 is fonts, Scribus does not pick
> up all the fonts such as Helvetica, Times New Roman, none of them, this
> is with Scribus 1.0 RC1

I do not know about Suse, but it is commonly known that the Type1 fonts
included with Ghostscript are aliased to Helvetica, Times etc. Unless
you have the actual Times and Helvetica fonts installed properly, they
will not show up. Scribus uses the "real" postscript names of the fonts.
What will show up as Times in other applications will appear as Nimbus
No9 in Scribus. At least that is the way it works on every RH machine I
have installed Scribus on.

Hope that helps,
Peter