[Scribus] Tex/LaTex fonts with Scribus

[Terence Chan]

If I have even a moderate amount of text in a document, I'd
usually use latex to format the text, generate a PS file and
import it into Scribus, which generally works well. However,
it would be useful to be able to use the latex fonts in a text
frame to make minor additions in Scribus. The latex package
comes with a large collection of fonts, many of which are supported
by Scribus, but most of  the standard latex fonts commonly used are
tfm fonts, which don't work well in Scribus, in particular, spaces
between words in a text frame are not rendered properly.

I know, I've read the documentation about how Scribus is really fussy
about fonts and the tfm fonts fail the tests recommended in the docs,
but from long experience of using latex, I know these are good quality
very attractive fonts. In recent years, latex has become the standard text
formatting tool for any kind of mathematical typesetting, as well
as a very powerful typesetting tool for general text, to the extent
that anyone preparing a document with substantial mathematics will not
dream of using anything else and any commercial publisher of mathematical
books will invariably accept .tex files. In fact, I'd go so far as
to say that latex is better than scribus for books/articles that
consist mostly of text, with just a few diagrams, line drawings etc.

Anyway, the upshot of this rather long-winded post is a request for
future releases of Scribus to support all the fonts in the tex/latex
package. This will make it even more attractive to those of us
from a pure text publishing background who need the more powerful
layout capabilities of Scribus when mixing text with photos, illustrations
etc. Are there any compelling reasons why this would not be possible
or desirable from the Scribus point of view?

Terence