[Fwd: Re: [Scribus] Newbie font-question]

[Craig Bradney]

Ok, the ttmkfdir  with the -m 50 switch fixed the issue :) Thanks
Subash!

> Not all fonts are equal - and *usually* you have to pay a lot for decent
> ones. 

Yes, missing glyphs in this case. In this case, its a corporate font
that has fewer glyphs because the font is used only for text and not for
anything else. The font only has punctuation, numbers, upper and lower
case and a most higher (>128,<256 ASCII) characters including all
accented characters, and similar characters in other tables for other
languages. 

Whether this is therefore a 'bad' font or not, I'm not sure. I wouldnt
think so. Its made for a purpose. The fact that its missing some glyphs
shouldnt mean that the postscript or other system falls apart (or
appears to), which is at this stage in Linux still an issue. 

Looking at fonts you mention though, such as the Vera and Utopia fonts,
Its not immediately obvious which other characters are missing.. it
seems as complete as the others. Perhaps a setting of -m 20 might have
fixed this issue too.

> However, in the postscript world, these types of fonts frequently have
> problems printing and displaying properly. In all the time I have been
> testing Scribus, I have almost never had problems with fonts displaying
> or printing. Why? 

If the fonts I use work perfectly in InDesign, export to PDF perfectly
and then print perfectly at a commercial printer then I think I should
be able to expect them to work in Scribus if they also work in KDE,
Kword, OpenOffice, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not just coming from a Windows world, having
used various flavours of Unix, Linux and OS/2 for many years as well as
Windows. It is though on Windows where I have used DTP to any major
extent.

> So, no, there may be cases where not all of your fonts will work with
> Scribus. It is just not as simple as Macs or Windows. Sorry.

That is a fairly typical Linux opinion. In cases where I have been the
maintainer/developer I have also thought similar thoughts. This will
not, however bring Linux to the mainstream. I guess it might have been
in some docs somewhere, but I perhaps Kfontinstaller maybe should have
warned about this kind of issue, or another program. Still, in the end,
if KDE can use the font, Scribus should be able to, no questions asked.
In this case, it was not Scribus' fault but the fonts.scale/dir setup.

Anyway, not complaining. Linux does an awesome job, the KDE/Qt etc
developers do a wonderful job, and of course the Scribus developers also
are doing a great job. On top of that, its all free.

More issues to tackle soon enough I guess, as I will produce the next
edition of the magazine in both InDesign and Scribus and see how the two
compare. 

The editing issue (shift left/right) as described in my previous post is
an issue for now though as I often need different fonts in the same text
box. Doing it with a mouse seems to make Scribus flicker a lot and is
very innacurate. Perhaps 1.01 will fix that. I am emerging it now.

Thanks for everything

Craig