[Scribus] New fonts as OT or just TTF/Type1?

[John R. Culleton]

On Wednesday 22 March 2006 18:31, avox wrote:
> Christoph Sch?fer wrote:
> > ... OTF is the future, but unfortunately it's not the present
> > for all applications yet. OO.o doesn't support OTF. You can't use
> > OpenType there.
>
> As I gather from http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=37073
> OO.o *does* display OpenType fonts, it just doesn't apply the advanced
> tables.
> Note that stacking diacritics, vertical layout, ligatures and all those
> other OTF
> features can't even be expressed in TTF and Type1.

IMO until Scribus finds a way to use the TeX typesetting engine 
it will always be behind the curve on text. Stacked diacritics
are handled in TeX by building them. The true signature of
TeXpert Han The Thanh is bult like this in Context:

[H\`an Th\^e\llap{\raise 0.5ex\hbox{\'{}}} Th\`anh}

--which is very clumsy but it gets the job done. The "e" in The
gets the stacked diacritics, grave over circumflex. 

There are many other areas, like hanging punctuation,
justification by paragraph instead of lines and so forth where
only TeX and InDesign (which uses some TeX code) have the top
quality output. There should be a way to feed TeX the text and
the dimensions and get good typesetting back. Irregular text blocks
can be calculated using an automatically generated \parshpe
command. 

It isn't easy, but it may be necessary. It would give Scribus
better typesetting than its closest commercial rival, Quark. 
-- 
John Culleton
Book coaches, consultants and packagers:
http://wexfordpress.com/tex/packagers.pdf