[Scribus] Fonts Fonts Fonts...

[Peter Linnell]

On Thu, 2003-03-27 at 12:02, Mark Muller wrote:
> Okay, Thanks for the lcms.h missing file help Phil. Here goes for another 
> small issue you may or may not be able to help out with.
> 
> Working as a professional repro guy I have access to all the Font libraries 
> from the various different vendors. Under MDK9.1rc2 I have been able to load 
> up various nice Type1 adobe faces - adobe garamond for example. This font 
> displays perfectly under OpenOffice 1.0.2 but when running Scribus0.9.8 the 
> face looks awful - I mean unuseable for any kind of typesetting or page 
> layout. Come to think of it any of the faces that appear in the list look 
> bloody awful ;)

I am fortunate to have a similar collection of tried and true Type 1
fonts, so I can understand your frustration.

Some of the font display issues surfaced with changes in Qt3. As a side
note, I have compiled older versions of Scribus on Solaris / Intel with
Qt 2.2.2 and Sun's Xwindows. Solaris Xwin includes some of Adobe's
display postscript technology and the fonts rendering looked beautiful.
Actually, I should revive that little side project and post some screen
caps.. we might get some Solaris folks working on this, as I find on the
whole they are a pretty sharp bunch. 

That said, I think it is fair to say and I think both Franz and Paul
would agree,  upgrading Qt to 3.1.2 will improve screen rendering of
fonts, especially at 100% view, which was more typical in Scribus 0.6.
on Linux. 
> 
> Secondly on reopening Scribus the typefaces do not even appear in the font 
> list ?  Is this normal behavior ??

No, this due to some of the font matching patterns in the fontconfig
libraries in Xft2.  I wrote a separate set of notes regarding this with
Red Hat 8.0, which has similar issues.
www.atlantictechsolutions.com/scribusdocs/redhat80.html 

Simply put, fontconfig while it is an excellent general purpose font
matching and rendering solution, is still a work in progress. I am going
to test the latest package in the few days to see how it works with
Scribus.


Hope that helps,
Peter