[Scribus] Font selection

[Craig Ringer]

Andrew S. Townley wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have been experimenting with Scribus lately and have a big problem
> selecting fonts.  I went through the mailing list archives and this was
> a problem back in 2003 that supposedly would be fixed soon, so I was
> wondering what the plans for this really were.
> 
> I think the problem is really a bug in the underlying Qt pop-up list
> library which doesn't provide automatic scrolling for large lists

It's actually a bug in the particular Qt style. Changing Qt styles in 
the preferences or using the qtconfig utility will fix the problem.

> but I
> think only being allowed to use the standard font dialog in one place in
> the UI isn't a good choice.

For Linux, which you mention you're using below, there *is* no standard 
dialog at all. The closest things to it are the dialogs provided by 
GNOME and KDE - both of which require integration with libraries Scribus 
doesn't use for portability reasons. Other OSes do have standard font 
dialogs, but they can't display all the fonts Scribus knows about (and 
the same problem applies to the KDE and GNOME ones). Scribus can use 
fonts the OS doesn't understand or doesn't know how to find, and a 
Scribus user can tell Scribus NOT to use fonts the OS might otherwise 
offer. Given this, the use of a standard font dialog even when one is 
available is quite unattractive, especially since that dialog might 
return the selected font in a form that's very hard or impossible to 
translate into a font that Scribus knows about (naming differences, etc 
etc etc).

It's certainly a good idea to have a more traditional font selector 
dialog - perhaps modeled on the KDE one - available, but I doubt it's 
practical to use a "standard" one in the sense of a base dialog from the OS.

> If you wanted to compromise, there might
> either be a preference for using the pop-up or the font dialog or you
> might have a [Choose Font...] button next to the pop-up which would show
> the standard font dialog.
> 
> My current problem relates to a large number of fonts installed on my
> Linux machine and trying to use Scribus at 1024x768 resolution.  As far
> as I can tell, unless I go in and remove certain fonts from being
> available to Scribus, there's no other way I can select fonts after the
> first 4 columns in the list.

Yep, again, try changing the widget style. Your problem should go away. 
I think this bug was fixed in Fedora Core 5; if not, go yell at the 
Fedora Qt maintainers until they fix their buggy style.

--
Craig Ringer