[Scribus] font management

[Craig Ringer]

Bart Alberti wrote:

>I applaud this thread. I have used the links on the site to download e.g.
>Manfred klien's fonts (many, not all); but the recommended Corel Draw (Bit
>stream really) are NOT (?) available as they are copyright. Yes/no?
>
Most fonts are subject to copyright, including freely downloadable and 
open source fonts. However, the Corel ones are distributed under a 
proprietary license that does not permit redistribution.

This is an important distinction to understand as an open source 
software user.

>The[re] MUST be a better way of handling 'bad' fonts besides crashing out with
>signal #11.
>
Scribus does its very best to handle bad fonts gracefully, but it's 
reliant on freetype. If there's a programming mistake (bug) in freetype 
that causes it to fail to notice corruption or incorrectness in a font, 
freetype may crash or damage the memory of its self and/or the 
application it runs in. Scribus has no protection from these errors, so 
if freetype crashes that appears to the user as a crash in Scribus. The 
only way to fix these is to improve the error checking in freetype. This 
is the same problem that applications that use libjpeg, libpng, etc 
suffer from with bad images.

The only other solution would be to load fonts with some sort of 
out-of-process helper and use IPC to get the font data into Scribus. I 
personally expect that'd be rather clunky and painful to code, as well 
as running slower. That, or use a language that's not so prone to 
unchecked crashes and corrupting memory :-P (but that makes them usable 
to fewer people, thus they're likely to stick with C despite the many 
pains involved).

--
Craig Ringer