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

[avox]

John R. Culleton wrote:
> 
> 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. 
> 

That's exactly why you want to have OTF. Scribus will never expect
such clumsy sysntax from its users.



> 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. 
> 

The TeX engine also has disadvantages, eg. concerning international text,
font handling and parshapes with holes. The new Scribus text engine will
support whole paragraph optimization with bidi text and parshapes with
holes. I also plan to implememt some newer pdftex ideas like optical margins
and character extension.



> 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. 
> 

I had the same idea but more as an easy way to import TeX sources 
into Scribus (and keep them editable). I don't think the average Scribus
user would benefit from it, but TeX authors could finally use
a direct manipulation page layout program for creating posters or
bundling articles in a larger document.

Relying totally on TeX as rendering engine would surely alienate Scribus
from its users. And it's quite possible to implement advanced linebreaking
and justification in Scribus itself, maybe even with features TeX is
lacking.
Wait and see :-)

/Andreas
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