[scribus] Find a font

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:45:13 +1100 (EST)
"Owen" <rcook at pcug.org.au> dijo:

>I forget your original problem, but if it was to stop the "Replacing
>Font" dialog box from appearing, do a global search and replace with a
>font name the you have.
>
>If Arial did nothing before, then the replacement font will do nothing
>also.

The problem is that I do not know if Arial did nothing before. It may
have been applied only to a stray character, a space, a period, or
something else inconsequential. If that is the case, then replacing it
with another font is an excellent solution.

But what if I really did set a block of text in the document to Arial?
Changing the font would cause text to reflow, possibly messing up the
layout. I can't risk printing thousands of copies of the document with
a serious error in it like that.

The only solution is to find the text that has Arial applied to it.
Only then can I be sure that changing the font will cause no harm to
the layout.

I am also sorry to report that searching for the font in Story Editor
is too buggy to be reliable. I have searched all text frames in the
first 13 pages of this 132 page document. There were 28 text frames.
Once it said it found two instances of Arial. But it did not highlight
the instances. I tried to search again hoping to be able to see the
places where it found Arial, but the second time it said it found no
text with Arial applied. 

In another story it said it found no instances of Arial. I edited the
story by creating a space at the end of a line and applied Arial to it.
I did the search again and it still said it found no instances of
Arial, yet it highlighted the entire first two lines of the story as
though they were in Arial (they were not), and did not highlight the
space to which Arial had been applied. I exited the Story Editor and
updated the text frame. Then I opened Story Editor and ran the
search again. Again, it said it found no instances of Arial, yet
highlighted the first two lines, and did not highlight the space with
Arial. 

At this point I must conclude that there is no solution. Even if I
search all the hundreds of stories one at a time I cannot rely on the
results of the search. I think the only safe thing to do is to retrieve
the Arial Regular font from my old Jaunty disk, install it, then go
back to the copy of the Scribus document that was not altered by
changing the font when the document was opened on Fedora. I'll lose a
few hours of work, but I knew I might have to pay a price for using
1.3.5.1. No hard feelings. 

On another note, not being able to find instances of a font
document-wide is a serious lack. The font details must be encoded in
the xml file and it ought to be possible to locate text to which a font
has been applied. Indeed, I found references to the font with Gedit; I
just couldn't understand the code that I was reading. Might it be
possible to create a script to do this and present the text to the user
in a format that is easy to understand?