[Scribus] OpenType support in Scribus 1.1.x

[Atlantic Tech Solutions]

On Tue, 2003-11-04 at 15:27, Stefan Baums wrote:
> Dear list,
> 
> I am interested in the new OpenType support of the Scribus
> development version.  The website states that
> 
>    Scribus [as per 1.1.1] now can fully support for Open Type
>    fonts, including sub-setting in PDF and postscript. All glyphs
>    are accessible including expert sets, true small capitals, old
>    style figures and enhanced ligatures..
> 
> What do you mean by ?can? in that statement?  As far as actual
> OpenType support is concerned, according to my experiments with
> 1.1.2 that seems to be pretty much limited to GPOS support (what I
> got working was horizontal GPOS kerning with Microsoft?s Times New
> Roman font).  Scribus did not seem able to perform GSUB ligature
> substitution, nor does there seem to be OpenType support for
> non?Latin scripts.  (At least not for Devan?gar?.  While this may
> not be a high priority for current users, it would be nice having
> seeing that QT, GTK, OpenOffice and Yudit all now support it.)
> 
> Could you please give some details on what parts of OpenType
> Scribus verifiably supports at the moment?  If any of the
> abovementioned non?working features are supposed to be working,
> I?ll be happy to give more details about my fonts and setup to
> help debug the issue.
> 
> Many thanks,
> Stefan Baums

Support for some of the more exotic bits of Open Type are a work in
progress. The first and most difficult part of using Open Type was
getting them to embed into postscript and PDF properly. Franz just put
some fixes in for Hebrew TTF fonts. 

Our primary interest was to be able to use some of the high quality OTF
coming out of Adobe and others. The unintended side benefit is OTF can
in some cases make working with non-Latin scripts easier. 

Would you be able to point us at some good Devan?gar? OTF fonts which
are freely licensed ? 

We have found Arabic and Hebrew TTF, but not OTF. 

Any patches and suggestions would be welcome.

Regards,
Peter