[scribus] Is Scribus of No Practical Use to Engineers, Scientists and Mathematicians?

avox avox at arcor.de
Mon Aug 24 12:14:21 CEST 2009




Professor Rodney Coates wrote:
> 
> Hi Peter,
> 
> So what on earth is going on? It works for you and for Thomas on a PC,  
> but not for me.
> 
> I have now downloaded Scribus onto my wife's iMac. Clean easy download  
> and a rapid installation. BUT ....
> 
> Exactly the same problems as on my own PowerBook: Scribe, Mail,  
> TextEdit will not allow font changes to Symbol or Zapf Dingbats, will  
> allow pretty well everything else - I cannot check absolutely every  
> font on all of them. Illustrator, Word and Photoshop all allow Symbol  
> to be used just fine.
> 
> I shall try some more Macs tomorrow but I have to say I am mystified  
> and now, not at all convinced it is in fact a Scribus problem.
> 

Well, maybe we first have to clarify what it means for a symbol font to
"work".

Scribus uses Unicode internally. The keys on your keyboard produce a Unicode
key and that is looked up in the font to produce a glyph. Unfortunately,
most glyphs
which are available in Symbol and Dingbats fonts dont have a Unicode key
which matches 
your keyboard: even in Symbol font, your "a" key will produce the Unicode
for Latin A,
not for Greek Alpha. That's probably also the reason why pure text-oriented
applications
like Mail and TextEdit reject those fonts.

To use these symbol fonts in Scribus, you need to go via Insert -> Insert
Glyph and choose
the symbol manually, or use the hotkey to directly enter Unicode in Scribus,
or
cut and paste the text from somewhere else. That might not be so
comfortable, but it's
the logical way.

HTH
/Andreas
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