[Scribus] fontconfig not working?

[Craig Ringer]

I should elaborate a little on my last message.

> Charles A. Landemaine wrote:
>> I am porting Scribus to PC-BSD.

Oh, by the way - cool. Thanks!

Please send any fixes or changes to us via the bug tracker. If they can 
be merged without breaking anything else, they will be; otherwise it's 
often possible to come up with a different fix that can be.

> 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.

I should explain this. I'm no designer, but I think I know the 
rudiments. Someone yell at me if I'm dead wrong about any of this.

The first thing to consider is that Scribus is for designing documents 
that be read as PDFs or to be printed. On-screen readability in Scribus 
isn't as important as getting a good idea how it'll look when it comes 
out in the target media.

When looking at text from a DTP perspective, you don't just care about 
fitting it in a certain space and making it readable, though both are 
important. You're looking for how it looks in the large scale - how it 
flows, whether there are "rivers" of white space through the text, how 
the justification looks, etc. You can't do that without the on-screen 
rendering of the text being positioned and sized just how it will be on 
paper (allowing for the limitations of the pathetic resolution of 
computer monitors - mine is only 120dpi and that's high). Additionally, 
if you're working in detail in a certain area of the text you can zoom 
in. Writing and proofing of the text is typically accomplished before 
importing the text into Scribus, or sometimes done in the story editor 
in Scribus its self.

Short of having 300dpi monitors, I don't think we can provide accurate 
character shapes and positions *and* respect the user's antialiasing 
settings. Of course, with a 300dpi display, there'd be much less need 
for antialiasing anyway. I think Scribus makes the best trade-off if a 
single option has be selected. Maybe it'd be nice to be able to switch 
to native font rendering in future (direct use of freetype), though I 
can't imagine that being an easy thing to accomplish and I'm not sure 
it'd really be useful.

Any other views would be welcome, but that's how I see it, and that's my 
understanding of why things are how they currently are.

--
Craig Ringer