[Scribus] OT: system-wide font management on Linux

[PLinnell]

On Wednesday 15 March 2006 17:11, Sebastian R?der wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> for a long time I have plant to organize and manage the fonts on my
> linux box some how to make it easier to find the appropriate (good
> quality) fonts for any task in apps like OpenOffice and Scribus.
>
> I know that Scribus has a good font management build in, so from
> the Scribus side it's not a problem. However e.g. OpenOffice shows
> a rather long font list and only gives the user the possibility to
> ADD fonts, but not to DISABLE them.
>
> My main idea is to strip down my install to a bare minimun of fonts
> (mostly fonts that are needed for the GUIs and such) and then add
> all my high quality DTP fonts (from MS Office, Adobe Products on my
> Windows Install) to a custom dir in my home. I can do the last step
> by using the KDE "font manager". My question is whether anybody
> knows a "real" more powerfull font manager that can show e.g. all
> glyphs of a font, the kerning infos and some kind of
> classification. I could only find such apps for Win and Mac.

I use this same method, with font families in a common directory. On 
average I run with ~ 200-300 fonts active, but have ~1500 on disk.

Nothing yet solid enough to use in the same manner. I have seen a 
couple appear on sourceforge, but really just beginning.

As for seeing all glyphs in a font, excepting Scribus' insert glyph 
palette - nothing besides fontforge.

Kcharselect *can* show you the glyphs in a font, but will substitute 
missing ones from another font if they are not included. eg. Adding 
Latin alphabet in a symbols font.

> The second questions is related to the fonts that belong to xorg. I
> can finetune quite well which of them I want to install thanks to
> the new modular release 7.0 of xorg-x11. But I am not sure what
> e.g. the fonts in the dirs /usr/share/fonts/100dpi and 75dpi are
> for. Is this only for display on the monitor? 

You need those core bitmap fonts for console. Try and remove the misc 
path and then startx ;-)

> Same goes for the 
> fonts that come installed with ghostscript into
> /usr/share/fonts/default/ghostscript - are they required for a
> working ghostscript?

Yes, they are and depending on how Ghostscript is built, they may or 
may not be compiled into GS itself. 

> I hope my main idea is quite clear now and other people that dealed
> with font management on Linux can give me some tipps.
>
> Regards
> Sebastian

You are going about this in the right way IMO. It works fine for me 
too.

Peter