[Scribus] font management?

[Louis Desjardins]

Craig Ringer a ?crit :
> 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.

Hi Craig,

You must be right. My use of the words install/uninstall must refer to a 
total different issue. So, yes, load/unload is what I think can work 
better, while the document is open. In a very definite environment, it 
couldn't be a must but when you deal everyday with lots of different 
files coming from most anywhere, you need the fonts to be there quick.
> 
> 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'm glad to know that!
> 
> 
>>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.
My understanding is this is clearly a DTP issue (it always ends up to 
us!!!). Would that be a different project, though?

Thanks for the feedback and answers!

Louis
> 
> --
> Craig Ringer
> 
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-- 
Louis Desjardins
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Mardigrafe inc.
t?l. +1 514 934 1353
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