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

[Christoph Schäfer]

Am Samstag, 25. M?rz 2006 01:29 schrieb 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.

Hi John,

in case I'm not totally wrong, avox is currently working on the new text 
engine by implementing, guess what, TeX algorithms ;)

I think we can expect _much_ better typesetting in 1.4, but you still have to 
acknowledge that the purposes of TeX/LaTeX and a DTP application are 
different. In TeX, you let the software do almost every typographic 
operation. In a DTP program, you _want_ to retain a maximum of control over 
each dot and each spacing, which is very hard in TeX.

Cheers,

Christoph