[Scribus] Announcement: typography page on scribus wiki

[Christoph Schäfer]

Hi Fred,

> Typography is even more of a black art when you consider that usages can 
> vary a lot according to language.

Absolutely correct! My experiences are mostly based on German 
typography, but I try to take into consideration English/American usage 
as well. If you think you can contribute something useful or discover 
any mistake, create an account as wiki contributor and add whatever you 
think is correct/necessary.

> I know (a bit of) French typographical rules as standardized by the 
> "Imprimerie Nationale", the national printing office. Those differ from 
> English rules on several points, maybe a distinct page would be needed 
> (should it be in French or in English though, or both maybe ?).

Thank you!

> However I've had lots of problems with typographical management in 
> Scribus mostly with characters outside of the low (latin pages) range of 
> the Unicode charset. Non-breakable spaces for example often end-up as 
> squares (as do en-dashes or em-dashes or a number of other characters). 
> This is an issue with most fonts even though they do support those 
> characters (they work fine in OOo for example). I often end up using the 
>   fonts that come with Windows because they don't seem to exhibit this 
> behaviour. I haven't pinpointed where the problem comes from exactly.

Which fonts did you use? Most of what comes with average Linux distros 
is often low or average quality. Look at the Wiki to find links to some 
free high quality fonts and try if they produce better results. If they 
do, you should buy some. To produce high quality printing, requires 
reliable fonts! The few bucks you have to pay for an old version of 
CorelDraw (including lots of excellent fonts) are really worth it. In 
case the problem is not with the fonts, you should contact the 
developers and send them an example (but read the wiki entry on font 
issues first).

Christoph