[Scribus] fontconfig not working?

[Craig Ringer]

Charles A. Landemaine wrote:
> I am porting Scribus to PC-BSD. It seems to be a quite nice
> application and it looks like a fair alternative to InDesign in many
> cases. Congratulations :)
> 
> I have been frustrated looking in menus, searching on the Internet how
> to enhance my fonts in Scribus. It seems it doesn't take the system
> font configuration (fontconfig) into account and rather uses
> antialiasing for any font at any size making them blurred and hard to
> read. Please have a look at it:
> http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/5531/scribus6zf.png

That's expected behaviour. Scribus uses freetype to produce a vector 
outline of fonts, and draws with that. IIRC Franz needed to to it that 
way in order to achieve the required character positioning accuracy, 
etc. Ancient versions used to use freetype to draw the text, and it 
wasn't pretty.

As a desktop publishing application, character position and shape is 
*much* more important than readability. I do agree it'd be nice to have 
both, and it'd be nice to have the option to switch off antialiasing, 
but it's not presently something that can be realistically done.

Scribus isn't as such ignoring your fontconfig settings - in that it's 
using them for the menus and all the other GUI elements that are drawn 
with freetype through Qt. It just renders the on-canvas text in a way 
that ends up antialiased all the time.

What might be interesting is to offer subpixel antialiasing on the 
canvas so that LCD users get better shaped and positioned text.

--
Craig Ringer