[Scribus] Charset problems with Scribus

[Fred Albrecht]

Well this is my first post to the list so hello everybody :)

It's not really my first post since I posted earlier but it didn't seem 
to get through...

So, introducing myself : I'm mostly a Unix/linux type, I never really 
did any DTP (except for the odd job every now and then) although I have 
done lots of electronic publishing. Currently most of my job is 
consulting on setting up MS based solutions for small companies.

My last "real" work with DTP sofware was with Xpress on a Mac SE quite 
some time ago.

Anyway, my GF runs a non profit org that is a kind of sailing school for 
children. As such they have a newsletter for members. Since none of the 
members of the group that was supposed to do the newsletter knew 
anything about DTP or event basic document layout (hello font soup) or 
even had an adequate piece of software to handle the task, I'm the one 
who ended up with it.

My current problems are mostly related to the handling of non breaking 
spaces. Non breaking spaces are an important feature of French 
typography, you'll find them before colons, semicolons, after and before 
the typographical quotation marks (aka chevrons), between block of 
dugits in large numbers (where usians would use commas), etc.

Although strictly speaking, in most cases they should be "narrow 
no-break spaces" but very few word processors support those so they are 
often simulated by adjusting the kerning.

So onwards to the question :

Scribus supports Unicode. Unicode defines both "no break space" (U+00A0) 
and "narrow no break space" (U+202F). The first of those is also part of 
the Latin-1 (and Latin-9) charset. However, when I use it in a document, 
the resulting PDF displays it as a square (I haven't yet tried the 
second, not knowing whether a special font should be used).

Is there a way around this ? Is it a font issue (I currently use the 
Bistream Vera Sans font) ?

Help with this would be most welcome...

-- 
Fred.
   Linux, {Free,Open}BSD mercenary {sys,net}admin @ N48?53.115 E02?19.31
      This message is made from the freshest handpicked electrons
                       http://www.fredshome.org