[scribus] Outlining fonts

[Bert Driehuis]

On Sun, Jan 24, 2021 at 8:00 PM Gregory Pittman <gpittman at iglou.com> wrote:
> On 1/24/21 12:57 PM, Eric Hanuise wrote:
> > I was under the impression that when you render an outlined fonts pdf the text was also exported.
> >
> > Isn't it the case ? And if no, is this a technical limitation or simply something not (yet) implemented ?
>
> I just did a little experiment, and the answer is no, you cannot export the text from a PDF where the fonts are outlined.
> When a PDF contains embedded fonts, the rendering information is included in the file, along with the text (as text), and the PDF viewer renders the text using the font info.
> When the fonts are outlined, there is only the vector graphic information of the text as displayed in the text frames -- it's as if the text frame content was an image.
>
> This is not a defect in implementation, it's how PDFs work.

Well, yes and no. If an OCR application is able to insert a text layer
below a graphics layer for searching in PDF, then Scribus could in
theory do the same when outlining. As we say in the Open Source
community, "we're taking patches". It's just a SMOP [viz.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/SMOP.html].

Incidentally, having a text layer underneath the graphics will have a
side effect: during search, the PDF viewer will render the match in a
different font (usually Helvetica). So for searchable documents,
having them remain true to the design during searching means you have
to embed the fonts anyway.

With kind regards,

Bert