[Scribus] fonts suse 9.1 vs 9.2

[PLinnell]

On Thursday 10 March 2005 10:10, Tino Schwarze wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 08:36:58PM -0800, bart at solozone.com wrote:
> > OK, I will tell you what has happened. I culled the "bad fonts"
> > on SuSe 9.2 under scribus1.3.0cvs and put them in a "bad_fonts"
> > folder. Fine. I went through the 'font preview' one by one.
> >
> > HERE I AM under 9.1 and these same fonts are OK!! Do not tell me
> > fontconfig rejects them (as user fonts all BTW). 9.1 uses XFree86
> > and 9.2 uses X.org, yes/no? Is THIS what is going on? I do not
> > think the previous replies to my queries really got this
> > subtlety. The system fonts that SuSe used to ship (Omega e.g)
> > have vanished. How can one do DTP when one's OS stabs one in the
> > back?
>

It could have been an rpm "obsoleted" on upgrade, or not automatically 
included on install. 
> I suppose that the fonts shipped with 9.1 are available for free,
> so it would be a good time to grab them and make them available on
> some Scribus-related page.
>
> Bye, Tino.
>

Having tested some of those fonts, I am of the mind that they are best 
left behind or at least avoided for use with Scribus. 

I have written in the docs in several places the need for good high 
quality fonts for use in DTP, as well as proposing an alternative 
list of fonts which I *do* know work.

http://docs.scribus.net/index.php?lang=en&sm=setup&page=fonts2

One thing that this thread has brought to mind is how I test and 
define various states of brokeness in fonts and which ones I put on 
the 'maybe' list. 

Bart sent me more of the "disappearing" fonts off list. To sum up, 
most of them are well and truly not useful for various reasons which 
I will outline in some new docs.

I am going to sit down and write something in the next few days to 
give some basic hints on how one can make a reasonable guess as to 
which fonts are usable and which ones are not. 

The short list of good high quality fonts freely available is not a 
conspiracy. It takes lots of repetitive drudgery to do the QA needed 
for creating reliable fonts. Like specialized vertical applications, 
fonts is one area OSS has made slower progress than say the desktops 
like Gnome, XFCE and KDE or broadly used apps like K3B. 

Cheers,

Peter