[Scribus] font management?

[Louis Desjardins]

>On Friday 15 April 2005 11:11, Tariq Rashid wrote:
>>  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.
>
>As Craig Ringer said,  this wouldnt be appropriate as a downloadable as part
>of the main Scribus package.
>
>What we plan is a method for you do be able to grab fonts from distributions'
>font repositories out on the net. It will tie in with the font replacement
>dialog when you dont have a font installed, and will allow network setups to
>have a common font dir to install from etc.
>
>Craig

Hi,

We have 2 different things here.
1. getting the font collections aboard
2. ability to manage them, ie install/uninstall according to jobs (to 
avoid endless menu of fonts...)

All this has to be done with at least one things in mind: avoiding 
font conflicts which can be (are) a nightmare in production 
environment where the "pick another font" workaround is most of the 
time just not possible...

The "suitcase" approach, or whatever we want to call it, gives imo 
the best results in production although it's not perfect.

What works very well in Scribus right now is
1. user can download from the Scribus website a fair amount of good fonts
2. user can use its own collection of fonts, whether it be commercial 
packages or not
3. user can install the needed font through an easy to understand interface

What can work better is
1. ability to install/uninstall fonts when a document is open
2. ability to have Scribus look for needed fonts when opening a 
document (and get them)

I have one question about this:
Is it possible to make use of aliases of fonts instead of the fonts 
themselves so we can avoid duplicating fonts to set the font folders 
we need and put the aliases in instead? If so, can someone tell me 
how.

One other thing that calls for a decent font manager tool in the 
working environment is if we're going to use as tightly as possible 
other applications such as OpenOffice.org in the workflow (and we 
certainly will, I guess). Make use of the stylesheets implies make 
use of the same fonts. If each of the programs have their own way to 
manage fonts, isn't it going to be close to unmanageable?

There is be more to this. Only a few ideas.

Let's hear more!

Louis