[Scribus] Charset problems with Scribus

[Craig Bradney]

Hi Fred,

> Well this is my first post to the list so hello everybody :)
> 
> It's not really my first post since I posted earlier but it didn't seem 
> to get through...

It made it through. Welcome aboard :).

> So, introducing myself : I'm mostly a Unix/linux type, I never really 
> did any DTP (except for the odd job every now and then) although I have 
> done lots of electronic publishing. Currently most of my job is 
> consulting on setting up MS based solutions for small companies.
> 
> My last "real" work with DTP sofware was with Xpress on a Mac SE quite 
> some time ago.
> 
> Anyway, my GF runs a non profit org that is a kind of sailing school for 
> children. As such they have a newsletter for members. Since none of the 
> members of the group that was supposed to do the newsletter knew 
> anything about DTP or event basic document layout (hello font soup) or 
> even had an adequate piece of software to handle the task, I'm the one 
> who ended up with it.
> 
> My current problems are mostly related to the handling of non breaking 
> spaces. Non breaking spaces are an important feature of French 
> typography, you'll find them before colons, semicolons, after and before 
> the typographical quotation marks (aka chevrons), between block of 
> dugits in large numbers (where usians would use commas), etc.
> 
> Although strictly speaking, in most cases they should be "narrow 
> no-break spaces" but very few word processors support those so they are 
> often simulated by adjusting the kerning.
> 
> So onwards to the question :
> 
> Scribus supports Unicode. Unicode defines both "no break space" (U+00A0) 
> and "narrow no break space" (U+202F). The first of those is also part of 
> the Latin-1 (and Latin-9) charset. However, when I use it in a document, 
> the resulting PDF displays it as a square (I haven't yet tried the 
> second, not knowing whether a special font should be used).
> 
> Is there a way around this ? Is it a font issue (I currently use the 
> Bistream Vera Sans font) ?

I'm not sure about the PDF export issue, will look into that with Franz.

If you look in the "Insert Special" window within Scribus when editing a
text frame you will see all of the glyphs available to Scribus within a
font. Any other glyphs do not exist, and you can confirm with pfaedit.
Note that windowing system such as KDE (eg in KCharSelect) and Gnome
have the ability to substitute glyphs from other fonts, even when they
do not exist. I'm not sure how you are using 202F and with Vera Sans
though, I just get a square in Scribus. I do however get the 00A0
working fine within Scribus.

Craig
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