[Scribus] Re: Scribus crashes with some ghostscript .pfa fonts

[Craig Bradney]

Hi Javier,

<snip>

> >No, but even though we now handle the freetype library better (since 3rd
> >March in CVS), it does not provide the required font checking. Right now
> >in my testing Scribus still segfaults with Hershey fonts installed and
> >AFAIK there are not too many more things we can do for checking in the
> >fonts until freetype itself handles this. Hopefully we can find a way to
> >avoid this. We were thinking of a font blacklist that was written to on
> >crash but its still unfriendly. Of course by default the blacklist would
> >include Hershey.
> 
> So you say it is really freetype which is not handling them...
> Strange I had never had a problem with those fonts before.

There are no "check this font is valid" routines in freetype from what
Franz says, apart from the returns of the function calls (of which we
now check all of them). You may never have a problem on the desktop etc,
but you will probably have a problem if you send these fonts off to a
postscript printer.

> So you are also a Gentoo user :) That's why I recalled your name from
> somewhere.
> I just unmerged the gnu-gs-fonts-other package. After all, I was not
> really using it.

Yes.. and the number of us is growing :)

> >system. The only fonts seperate from Xfree that I have emerged are
> >urw-fonts and ttf-bitstream-vera. All my other fonts come from a Corel
> 
> Yeah I have urw and the vera fonts --which by the way are all I use on
> my desktop now, they look incredible and no license issues!--.
> 
> >set of 1000 fonts I own and are all good quality. 
> 
> Now that you say that, I remember I have a couple CDs full of nice fonts.

Have a look there.. I'm sure you will more than likely find a
replacement to Hershey :)

> >I have spoken to spyderous - Donnie Berkholz (?)  (the guy who maintains
> >Gentoo's XFree ) about those Hershey fonts before and we did discuss
> >removing them from Gentoos distribution because of the issues in general
> >with Hershey. Not sure whatever came of that.
> 
> I didn't get to seek on bugs.gentoo.org since I thought it was a Scribus
> only problem.

The issue is highlighted by Scribus, and there may be more that we can
do to handle the crashes, but the real issue with the font lies within
the bugs in the fonts themselves.

Craig
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