[Scribus] Font selection

[Andrew S. Townley]

Hi Craig,

Thanks for the help.

I don't use KDE by default so it is whatever KDE style RedHat put as the
default style.  I'll try changing it.  Maybe this should be a FAQ or
something... (I did try to look first).

Re: font dialog.  Apologies.  I had assumed since it was using Qt that
it would be able to use some sort of standard Qt font dialog.  I haven't
programmed with Qt, but other widget sets provide this capability. 
However, I take your point that Scribus manages fonts differently than
the underlying OS, so it probably wouldn't work anyway.

Thanks for the tip.  Guess this means that I'll have to install whatever
provides the qtconfig utility.  It isn't installed on my system.

Cheers,

ast

On Wed, 2006-09-13 at 08:16, Craig Ringer wrote:
> 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
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-- 
Andrew S. Townley <ast at atownley.org>
http://atownley.org