[scribus] Font oddities

[Franz Schmid]

John Jason Jordan schrieb:
> Scribus 1.3.8 and Fontmatrix 0.6.99 on Fedora 13, x86_64.
> 
> Two perplexing issues:
> 
> 1) Scribus finds the following fonts, which do not exist on the
> computer, as far as I can tell:
> 
> Hershey-Gothic-English
> Hershey-Gothic-German
> Hershey-Gothic-Italian
> Hershey-Plain-Duplex
> Hershey-Plain-Duplex-Italic
> Hershey-Plain-Triplex
> Hershey-Plain-Triplex-Italic
> Hershey-Script-Complex
> Hershey-Script-Simplex
> 
> A filesystem search on Hershey turned up nothing, although the file name
> could be something else. More interestingly, Fontmatrix does not find
> them. Note: Fontmatrix crashes if any fonts are modified or deleted
> while it is running. And it does not refresh the font list when it is
> launched unless you manually delete the .Fontmatrix folder to force it
> to rebuild its list of fonts. I deleted the .Fontmatrix folder, but
> Fontmatrix still does not see any fonts named Hershey.
> 
> Even more interesting, applying any of the Hershey fonts to text in
> Scribus causes the text to appear as all underscores in the canvas.
> 
It seems that Fontmatrix includes them in the search path for Scribus.
But Scribus shouldn't use them at all because these fonts are very strange.
They are so called "Stroked Fonts" where the outlines in the font are stroked
not filled as usual.

Because of that unusual behaviour of the Hershey fonts, Scribus shouldn't
use them, and there should be code to prevent that. Let me look into that issue.

> Google turned up a website which lists even more Hershey fonts and says
> they are "fonts converted from Hershey outlines." Apparently the site
> lists Type 1 fonts to be used with Ghostscript.
> 
> Any elucidation is welcome.
> 
> 2) My workhorse font is Junicode, a free open source font that is
> completely unrestricted. Scribus refuses to embed it when exporting as
> PDF, listing it in fonts to be outlined instead. In Preferences > Fonts
> it is checked that it can be embedded. Outlining it is not acceptable
> because my PDFs need to be searchable.
The Junicode can't be embedded because it contains too much glyphs, there
is a hardcoded limit of 2048 glyhps. Above that limit the font is always
outlined to prevent the resulting PDF being too large.

Greetings,
Franz Schmid
Scribus Team