[Scribus] 40-bazillion fonts

[Frank Cox]

I was just thinking about the handling of lots of fonts within Scribus and had
this idea:

It is my understanding that one way of adding fonts to Scribus is to simply put
a symbolic link to that font in one of the directories that you tell Scribus to
look in for fonts under Preferences - Fonts.

Therefore, to simplify font handling by keeping the list of active fonts
shorter and perhaps gaining a bit of a speed boost (?) how about adding a "font
update" button to the Scribus menu.  When you want to add a fancy font
to your current project, you could put a symbolic link to that font in the
appropriate directory and hit that button and Scribus would add it to the
list of available fonts.  Same thing if you decided against using that font --
delete the symbolic link and Scribus would remove it from the list.

To make things even nicer, we could have a "Scribus Font Handling Program" that
would show you samples of fonts in various directories as configured, and add
and remove symbolic links as needed.

This way, if you are selecting a font you can crank up the Font Handling
Program, scroll through the lists and samples, pick the one(s) that you want,
hit "add" and the symbolic links would be created.  Hit "font update" in
Scribus proper, and the font becomes available.

Perhaps another useful feature would be to give the Font Handling Program the
ability to scan a sla file and determine all of the fonts that are requested in
it, then either automatically add them from its list of available fonts, or
even just report them so the user can add them or not as he chooses.

This would allow one to have a nifty font sample/preview function, and to have
all of the fonts in the world available for use without continually adding to
the list of fonts in Scribus proper with the associated hit on memory usage and
the difficulty of simply finding the font that you want among a huge list of
fonts.

-- 
MELVILLE THEATRE ~ Melville Sask ~ http://www.melvilletheatre.com