[Scribus] font management?

[Tariq Rashid]

probably in contrast to common thinking, i am in favour of scribus managing
its own fonts. 

this means that:

 * scribus is packaged (tar.gz) with its own fonts, even if they are
duplicated
  by the OS. this means that scribus is more robust to OS changes and
mismanagement.
  also scribus can then provide good qaulity fonts and support issues are
much reduced.

 * it allows scribus to manage these fonts in the best way possibel for
scribus.

i think this is reasonable - because typefaces are central to scribus's job.
it's not the end of the world if an OS quirk changes the desktop menu fonts,
but for scribus this is important. 

you'll see this behaviour when Sun's StarOffice shipped early on. Also
wordperfecrt shipped its own fonts. Corel takes a hybrid approach.

myswelf - i would benefit from a stable Scribus platform - whatever the
underlying OS state.

t


-----Original Message-----
From: Craig Ringer [mailto:craig at postnewspapers.com.au]
Sent: 15 April 2005 08:53
To: scribus at nashi.altmuehlnet.de
Subject: Re: [Scribus] font management?


Paraplegic Racehorse wrote:

> I can't seem to find anything out there for managing fonts. Here, I'm 
> referring to managers such as Adobe Type Manager or Extensis Suitcase. 
> Suggestions? Ideas?

I'm using sets of folders, .fonts-mac-converted, .fonts-bad, 
.fonts-supplied-testing, etc , and managing them with fontconfig's 
per-user config file ($HOME/.fonts.conf).

It'd probably be pretty easy to whip up a GUI for it, and I think 
fontconfig supports symlinks too. I'm not sure if an app can ask 
fontconfig to re-load its cache at runtime, I'll check later. If so, 
it'd be possible for Scribus to use inotify to check if the fontconfig 
cache files changed and ask fontconfig to re-load its cache, then check 
for new/removed fonts.

I'm not volunteering, though... quite enough to do already.

--
Craig Ringer
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