[scribus] Font oddities

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sun, 21 Nov 2010 09:37:27 +0100
Franz Schmid <Franz.Schmid at altmuehlnet.de> dijo:

>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.

Thanks for the clarification. This is what I thought as well. If you
want me to file a bug report, I will do so.

>> 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.

Thanks for the clarification. However, it renders Scribus unusable for
me. In fact, it renders Scribus seriously impaired for anyone using
Asian languages or scientific work where we need lots of special
glyphs. Wasn't the whole purpose of creating the Unicode standard so
that we would not be limited by the few glyphs we could get into fonts? 

It reminds me of "640K ought to be enough for anyone."

Couldn't we at least offer the user the choice of subsetting the font?
OpenOffice.org automatically subsets the Junicode fonts. Better yet, let
the user embed the font, but give the user a warning about file size.

I left Windows and Adobe because I was tired of software that decided
things for me.