[Scribus] font management?

[Craig Ringer]

On Fri, 2005-04-15 at 08:20 -0400, Louis Desjardins wrote:

> What can work better is
> 1. ability to install/uninstall fonts when a document is open

Is that necessary? My personal view is that all that's really needed is
to hide/unhide, enable/disable, or perhaps at most load/unload fonts, at
least in a Scribus-specific solution.

Unlike the Macintosh, there is no major system-wide performance and
reliability hit with having lots of fonts present, the worst potential
effect being somewhat increased memory use. Consequently, I'm not sure
the same rather heavy handed measures used on the mac are necessary.

> 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.

You want symbolic links (or, failing that, you could use hard links).
Aliases are a Mac thing (actually a HFS/HFS+ thing, not even OS/X's UFS
implementation supports them) and work somewhat differently to anything
you'll currently find on UNIX.

Check out "man ln". Symlinking a bunch of fonts into $HOME/.fonts from
sorted source dirs then re-running fc-cache and relaunching apps should
do the trick. I'm hoping the "relaunching" bit can be eliminated by
having fontconfig reload its cache when we notice the cache file
changes, then check for differences ... we'll see.

> 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?

They all use fontconfig... that's part of why I want to focus on that as
a possible base for any solution.

--
Craig Ringer