[Scribus] Font trouble on MDK10 official

[Peter Linnell]

On Thu, 2004-05-27 at 17:12, Vladimir Zborowski wrote:
> Hi ,
> According to what I have read on this list, it might be a font issue, so 
> you should try to get rid of the ones you don't really need (by the way 
> does someone know a good font manager for Linux ? ).
> I'd be very happy to post you my "xft font configuration" but how can I 
> get that ? (As you can see I'm afraid I won't be a great technical help ;-)
> Vlad
> 
> 
> Robert French wrote:
> 
> > As Vlad suggested, I've installed the new rpm files, but scribus is  
> > still segfaulting at the same point. I've been looking around for  
> > information on xft, and I think it may be something to do with my 
> > font  configuration, or lack thereof. Could someone post their font  
> > configuration so that I can correct what's in mine?
> >
> > Thanks again,
> > Robert French
> >
> > On May 27, 2004, at 1:10 AM, Vladimir Zborowski wrote:
> >
> >> Hello,
> >> There is at least two rpms available for scribus 1.1.6, one on the  
> >> edulinux website http://edulinux.org/scribus/RPMS/
> >> and one in the club contribs of mandrake. They work fine for me (but  
> >> I'm using Mdrk 10 community).
> >> Did you already try them ?
> >>
> >> Vlad
> >>
> >> Robert French wrote:
> >>
> >>> Fellow Scribus Users,
> >>>     I'm having trouble getting Scribus (1.1.6 & 1.1.5) to run on  
> >>> MDK10 official. This was not a graphical machine initially, I've  
> >>> installed X, Qt, and some fonts myself to meet the scribus  
> >>> dependencies. When I start scribus, I get the splash screen, and 
> >>> then  it segfaults before any text is displayed on the splash 
> >>> screen. I've  looked at the core dump in gdb, and it told me this:
> >>>
> >>> crashes at XftDrawSrcPicture () from /usr/X11R6/lib/libXft.so.2
> >>>
> >>>     Since scribus compiles with no errors, I'm assuming that there  
> >>> are missing fonts or something? (Xft does deal with fonts, right?).  
> >>> My knowledge of fonts and X11 is very limited, but I'm willing to  
> >>> read whatever documentation I need to for scribus to work.
> >>>
> >>> Thank you,
> >>> Robert French
> >>>
> >>> By the way, I think Scribus is a great alternative for people who 
> >>> are  tired of dealing with Quark's crap.

My bet is you have installed some of the freefonts which include some
broken fonts. Scribus has code to test for this, as neither Qt nor
freetype2 test for font quality.

Mandrake packages some fonts, which are less than optimal quality IMO.

Call me a font snob, but the ones which I trust are

Luxi Fonts,
Ghostscript fonts
Utopia and Bitstream fonts from Xfree86
Gentium
URW fonts from Artifex.
LidoCE font
MS web fonts

Fonts to avoid:

Hershey fonts
some of the freefonts and sharefonts packages which come from
ftp.gimp.org
Free fonts downloaded from the internet.

on www.scribus.net there are links to find good quality fonts for Linux.

One other thing which could be messed is old font caches:

as root:

fc-cache -fv

will refresh the fontconfig font cache.

Hope that helps,
Peter