[Scribus] Linux Font Editor?

[Andreas Vox]

John Jordan wrote:

> Can we just get back to the font issue? I need a font with IPA
> characters that is (preferably) free, that is properly coded, and that
> I can recommend to beginning students. These students are going
> to use it with Word on Windows or a Mac to do their homework.
> The DTP/TeX/Scribus issue is irrelevant to them.
>
> Tobias mentioned some Type 1 fonts (TIPA) by Rei Fukui that I had
> not heard of. I'd like to check them out, but I can't figure out how to
> get them. I googled on Rei Fukui and it gave me a lot of links,
> including CTAN which listed a lot of fonts. But CTAN seems to
> require an account or password or something.

Can't be. CTAN is the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network which is free.
Maybe you have trouble with Ftp access? user "anonymous" + your (some) 
email address should work.
Even better: look for a CTAN server which offers Http access, that's 
more comfortable and has less problems with firewalls.

>
> Also, when viewing the list on CTAN it showed tipa10, tipa12,
> tipa17, and so on for a long list. Are these point sizes? If so, why?

TeX has it's own font creating program, metafont. Think of it as an 
algebraic description of multiple master fonts.. The old TeX way was to 
raster those at different sizes.

Nowadays the move is to reencode those old fonts as Type1 or TFF/OTF. 
Since the original was multiple master, this results in different 
design sizes for simple fonts.
*They are still vector fonts.*
It's just that a tipa10 scaled tp 17pt will look clumsier / bolder than 
an unscaled tipa17. The idea is to use the closest matching design size 
and scale that.


If you load any of those IPA fonts into Scribus 1.3.1 it will tell you 
on startup which are broken and which are not. Please note that Scribus 
has I quite strict view on brokenness, since those fonts must also work 
on any older professional print engine. BTW Scribus uses the widespread 
Freetype library for that: as soon as the font contains any glyph which 
Freetype can't load, the font is rejected.

Once you've found a suitable font you could use fontforge to place the 
glyphs at other codepoints or to delete broken glyphs or add your new 
ones. Please retest with Scribus once you changed a font.


/Andreas

PS: my personal recommendation for the next time you want to give LaTeX 
a try:

	Use LyX. It's a GUI frontend to LaTeX which hides most of the LaTeX 
internals. The only thing you need to know about LaTeX beforehand is 
that it restricts your formatting options in a very productive and 
professional way: 1) You choose a document class which fixes most 
layout options. 2) Then you use the paragraph layout styles offered by 
this document class. 3) If you can't achieve some special effect with 
LyX it's usually due to a very sound professional reason (like typing 
two spaces in row, mixing arbitrary fonts within a document, ...)
	LyX also has very good documentation on both LyX and LaTeX (as far as 
it's needed for LyX) .
	LyX should be preinstalled / easy to install on most Linux 
distributions. There are binary packages for Windows and Mac. You need 
an extra TeX distribution and an extra Ghostscript/GSView for those 
OSes, otherwise LyX won't work.
	And LyX even has a Norvegian developer on board! :-)

	My recommendations for learning LaTeX itself:
	1. Helmut Kopka: Introduction to LaTeX
	2. ftp://ftp.dante.de/tex-archive/info/lshort/english/ This is an 
electronic paper distributed with LaTeX which should get you beyond the 
first hello world
	3. The LaTeX Companion and The LaTeX Graphics Companion as a reference 
book and for all those advanced topics (if you really can't warm up 
with textbooks those two might be lost on you -- I was jsut surprised 
that noone else emntioned it :-)