[Scribus] The Bitstream Vera "Final" Fonts are released by Gnome

[Peter Linnell]

Hi Steve,


On Wed, 2003-04-23 at 17:19, Steve Herrick wrote:
> tech at atlantictechsolutions.com wrote:
> 
> >IIRC, you have RH 8.0.
> >
> Yes.
> 
> >First, add ./fonts to your home directory. Then drop the fonts you want to install.
> >
> Did that. I included local.conf. Was that right?

No, only one. Duplicate fonts can cause problems. Too fast with the
keyboard.  

~/.fonts OR whatever systemwide font directory if you want these fonts
available to all users. 
> 
> >Then open a console and do the following:
> >
> >$ mkfontscale
> >$ mkfontdir
> >$ fc-cache -v  -f ./
> >
> I was unclear here whether to do this in ~ or in /.fonts. I ended up 
> doing both. It said it succeeded both times.

I goofed the first step - oops

$ cd  to directory with new fonts

$ ttmkfdir -o fonts.scale ( for True Type fonts only) 
or just  (mkfontscale for Type1) 
$ mkfontdir
$ fc-cache -v  -f ./ 



> 
> >Then go to: http://www.atlantictechsolutions.com/scribusdocs/fontprefs.html
> >
> >and add this directory to scribus font preferences panel *without* a doc open. There will be slight pause as Scribus refreshes Xfree's font paths.
> >
> OK, I did all that.
> 
> >Then these new fonts will be available to Scribus.
> >
> This part didn't happen. The fonts were not there, even after restarting 
> Scribus. I had verified that the path I used was correct 
> (/home/esteban/.fonts), but after restarting, I couldn't reverify it, 
> because "Additional paths" was grayed out.

Because my goof would make scribus see those directories as not having
valid font paths. Scribus checks this very thouroughlly (in
self-defense) of font paths with broken fonts.dir files.  Add a whole
bunch of fonts and this quality check slows down loading of Scribus. 

This is in fact quite common with most DTP apps. They *really* need to
know what real fonts are installed *and* installed properly.  

Install several hundred fonts on some Win2k boxes and you can have lunch
with coffee and desert while you wait for illustrator 9 or 10. ;) 

> >The docs relating to font handling need quite a bit of rewriting, as Franz has added a lot more capabilities with Unicode, freetype etc. The new font preference setup works very well for me, provided you have correct fonts.scale and fonts.dir in each font directory listed in your font path. 
> >
> Well, maybe that's the problem. Where would I get these?

On my hard drive, being rewritten as fast as I can... I am hoping for a
weekend release of revised docs. 
> 
> >Overall, these are great enhancements which will make font handling easier for end users over time. 
> >
> I look forward to it. This issue is the only thing holding me on 
> proprietary software.

The other thing that helps is to upgrade Qt to 3.1.2, the text display
with good fonts is much improved. Probably the best since Qt 2.3.1 and
Scribus 0.6.

Sorry for goofs, we are only human...

Regards,
Peter