[scribus] How to tell a font is print worthy?

[Gregory Pittman]

On 04/03/2011 08:38 AM, Jean Basile wrote:
> I have read quite a few of the wiki texts on scribus related to fonts. And it does make sense that a 200$ font pack should offer some more features than a freeware font downloaded from some shady site. And those features hold something more than just the signing hand - a seasoned typographer or font creator as opposed to somebody with little to no experience trying to have some fun than sharing his achievement with the World. Although the latter has a worthy goal, the years of experience should make a notable difference.
>
> On the outside the free fonts usually lack characters beyond ASCII or Latin 1, they pack only a limited set (bold, italic, maybe bold-italic). But apart from these outside features what to look for when evaluating a font? Just printing at a few sizes might not be a good idea as it seems that a good font still might be a bad idea to use at certain sizes.
>
> Is there anything measurable, or it's down to years of looking at printed pages that one develops a certain feeling towards some qualities of a printed letter?

Scribus evaluates fonts when it first starts up, and disregards those 
that are not deemed "good". This mostly has to do with whether the font 
metrics are proper and other needed information is there. By definition, 
a bitmap font will be discarded.

OTOH, there are some "quality" fonts that look awful, and should be 
rarely if ever used. :)

Greg