[Scribus] Improve rendering of fonts

[Peter Linnell]

On Fri, 2003-05-23 at 19:09, Ing. Jozef Sakalos wrote:
> On Friday 23 May 2003 20:55, Sjoerd Hiemstra wrote:
> > Ing. Jozef Sakalos wrote:
> > > I attach the snapshot of how the font looks in scribus compared
> > > to openoffice. Of course, font rendering doesn't depend on an
> > > application on my system - openoffice is used only by chance.
> > >
> > > The only exception is scribus - fonts look horrible on the page
> > > but they look perfect on font face selection menus.
> >
> > If the page width is below about three quarters of the screen
> > width (adjusted either with View > some zoom factor, or with
> > Edit > Preferences > General > tab Display > Adjust Display size)
> > I see the same phenomenon.
> >
> > On both KDE3 and Blackbox, SuSE 8.2.
> >
> > However, the text displays fine if the zoom factor is larger than
> > that.
> >
> > SH
> Hi Sjoerd,
> 
> now we are at the bottom of the problem. I adjusted the Display size 
> to 136% as then I had paper:display 1:1.
> 
> When I put it back to 100% and view is also "Actual size" the font 
> rendering is fine - like in other applications (KDE 3.1.2, SuSE 
> 8.2).
> 
> The moment I adjust View or Display size fonts go astray.
> 
> It's definitely problem of Scribus not being able to render zoomed 
> fonts correctly.

If you set the display size to 100% in preferences, Zoom in at all
levels should work well - if freetype2 is working properly. Above 100%
freetype2 performs all the screen font rendering for Scribus. 

Moreover, this will be improved when Qt 3.2, See:
http://www.atlantictechsolutions.com/scribusdocs/screen/qt32b1.png

Once Qt 3.2 is a final release, I think this will be a must upgrade for
regular Scribus users - assuming nothing else gets broken. It has lots
of fixes which improve both speed and image quality rendering on the
canvas. I am quite pleased with the improvements. 

How I built qt 3.2 alongside qt 3.1.2 - which is what my KDE 3.1.1 was
compiled with.

download the qt beta source

make directory /usr/local/qt32

cd /usr/local/qt32

untar the source here

export QTDIR=$PWD 

./configure -system-zlib -qt-gif -system-libpng -system-libjpeg \ 
  -plugin-imgfmt-mng -thread -no-stl -no-g++-exceptions 
make symlinks sub-src sub-tools

then after Qt is compiled:

export QTDIR="/usr/local/qt32"

before running 

./configure && make

make install

in the Scribus source tree

then simply 

export QTDIR="/usr/local/qt32"

before launching scribus from the console

Regards,
Peter