[Scribus] phantom fonts

[Craig Ringer]

On Tue, 2005-04-05 at 16:10 -0700, bart at solozone.com wrote:
> I too have seen 'phantom' fonts. If one opens a new document and save,
> having used only a space character, then the phantom.sla file shows
> 
>  <ITEXT CAB="0" CCOLOR="Black" CSIZE="12" CH=" " CSHADE2="100"
> CSCALE="100" CSHADE="100" CSTYLE="0" CFONT="Century Schoolbook L
> Roman" CEXTRA="0"
> CSTROKE="Black" />
>    <PageItemAttributes/>
>   </PAGEOBJECT>
>  </DOCUMENT>
>  
>  and this is correct since the space character of that font has been
> in fact used. Moreover, if one uses a font and deleted its characters
> the fonts may still show in the *.sla file and in style--> font menu
> as being in use.

That's a known issue, and something that will hopefully be resolved
later. Scribus doesn't currently remove a font from the list of document
fonts if it's no longer in use, instead it eliminates fonts in use
during PDF export. Keeping better track of fonts in use would be nice, I
agree, or even being able to force it to re-scan for used fonts.

> If the font is not supported, but one thought it had been deleted,
> scribus will crash with 'signal #11,' it seems.

It'd be good if you could put that on the bug tracker if it's not
already.
 
> If we had "Reveal Codes" feature like Word Perfect one could edit
> attributes more easily. But scribus, of ocurse, has text strings in
> XML to control attributes, as opposed to WP control codes, for which
> there is, in another context, wp2latex.

XML is the on-disk representation of Scribus's documents, but they're
not worked with in memory as XML. There is no markup or codes to reveal,
really. There's also currently no markup to text frames, instead they're
split into many sub-parts wherever styles change. The new 1.3 format
plans to address this.

I do think it would be interesting to be able to ask a text page item to
generate an XML representation of its self and to be able to edit that
interactively. It'd be necessary to be extremely careful about
validation though.

-- 
Craig Ringer