[Scribus] fontconfig not working?

[Charles A. Landemaine]

Hello Craig,

Ok, you convinced me. This makes sense as, if I'm not mistaken, Adobe
InDesign also uses antialiasing at any font size, which can become
readable zooming in. I'm more used to porting regular desktop
applications (Opera, OpenOffice.org, etc...) which is a different
story, they target screen media whereas Scribus target the printing
media.
Thanks, and keep up the good work!

Charles.

On 6/18/06, Craig Ringer <craig at postnewspapers.com.au> wrote:
> 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
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>


-- 
Charles A. Landemaine.