[Scribus] good vs. bad fonts

[Christoph Schäfer]

> so how do you tell? what's the best way to know if a font is a viable
> choice (outside of "look") for a publication?

Jack,

there are some basic rules:

- Use of Adope/PS fonts will usually result in better output(print), but 
mostly will look ugly on screen. OpenType tries to finally keep the 
promises given with TrueType (equally good output on screen and in 
print), and OpenType is really better than TrueType. There are lots of 
TT fonts with printing issues, but you can find some really good ones as 
well. However, scribus will do a font check on startup, so you can be 
quite sure not to use "bad" fonts because they are ignored by scribus.

- Quality can also be measured by the number of glyphs provided. Do you 
need to write Greek or Hebrew? Do you need German quotation marks, 
umlauts? Good fonts usually have all or most of them (for that reason 
many of the fonts shipped with SuSE are quite useless, unless you only 
write English texts).

- A good font family will offer you at least 3 varieties for regular, 
italic and bold fonts, because in real typesetting you don't use the 
"fake" italics and bold letters as most people are used to from their 
word processor (that's, of course, not true for artistic or some ancient 
fonts).

With that in mind, you can start fishing for fonts ;-)

Christoph