[Scribus] Live-CD: TeX fonts

[Tobias Hilbricht]

Am Montag, 4. Juli 2005 01:18 schrieb PLinnell:
> On Sunday 03 July 2005 21:55, Christoph Sch?fer wrote:

> > in search for fonts to be included in the Live CD, I thought
> > converting TeX Metafonts might be a good idea as long as they could
> > be converted into reliable Type 1 fonts.
> >
> > Has anybody already had some experience with mftrace
> > (http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen/mftrace/) or textrace
> > (http://textrace.sourceforge.net/)?

I used mftrace as a convenient tool to convert some TeX Metafont sources into 
Type 1 fonts, in particular some of the "Bookhands" and "Trajan" Fonts by 
Peter Wilson. It was easy, and I could use them for a serious professional 
print project with Scribus.

But then, I might have been just lucky; also, a lot of manual extra work in 
Scribus has to be done (kerning, width etc.) with these homebrewed fonts - 
you do this only for a small number of headings or a couple of short lines, 
not for the bodyfont of a book.

Quite a number of the public Metafont sources have been converted into Type 1 
fonts in the last time using the tools you named. However, the "real" TeX 
Type 1 fonts (e. g. Latin Modern) have been created with a lot of skilled 
work, quite some money and it took quite some time to develop them, and there 
are still bugs in the fonts.  

> At first glance, I would be *very* skeptical of including any kind of
> converted fonts without some serious QA on the fonts after
> conversion.

This is certainly necessary if you want to rely on your fonts. In general I 
would go for fonts proven in practical work, and these are most of the time 
the known commercial ones - and some of the Computer Modern and the Latin 
Modern TeX fonts. Reliability and working efficiency can make a Adobe font 
cheaper than a free self knitted collection of glyphs.

Yours sincerely

Tobias Hilbricht