[scribus] Font in PDF does not match screen

[D. R. Evans]

D. R. Evans said the following at 07/17/2009 05:37 PM :

> The basic font used for the text is LMRoman12 (from the Latin Modern
> family). It looks fine on the screen and in the PDF. However, in a few
> places I have some titles in LMRomans12 Italic. These render correctly on
> the screen. However, in the generated PDF I see some sort of lightweight
> sans typeface instead.
> 
> I didn't see any warnings or anything when I generated the PDF.
> 
> So I have a few questions:
> 
> 1. Why does the PDF not contain the correct font?
> 
> 2. How do I make the PDF contain the correct font?
> 
> 3. Why wasn't some sort of error or warning thrown in my face to warn me
> that the PDF wasn't going to look like the screen?

Hmmm... well, I've sorted it out, but it seems like there's a sizeable
usability issue here.

Apparently Scribus doesn't embed all fonts by default. So the unwary user
could all-too-easily generate a document that doesn't have the right fonts
in it.

Worse, I would never have noticed this problem if I'd viewed the PDF only
with okular -- everything looked great in okular; but in acroread, it
didn't. Presumably, there's some setting on my system somewhere that tells
okular to go out and find the non-embedded fonts on the system (which makes
sense from okular's point of view). But that means that one doesn't realise
that some of the fonts aren't embedded and that the document will render
differently on someone else's system.

Acroread apparently doesn't go out and try to find the fonts and performs a
font substitution instead. I'm glad it does, otherwise I would never have
realised that my PDF was going to render differently on different systems.

The fix was obvious (just tell scribus to embed all fonts). But the fact
that it was pure chance that I noticed the problem means that it would have
been very easy to have circulated a PDF that would not have rendered
properly on other people's systems. It seems to me like scribus shouldn't
let this happen so easily.

  Doc

-- 
Web:  http://www.sff.net/people/N7DR

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