[scribus] Can Scribus use small caps from open-type fonts?

[Craig Ringer]

John Jason Jordan wrote:

> There are actually three ways to get small caps:
> 
> 1) In any word processor you can apply a small caps attribute, the same
> as italic, bold, etc. However, when the word processor applies italic
> or bold it does so by choosing the italic of bold font for the typeface
> you are using.

Not always, unfortunately. Word processors may also *create* fake bold
or italic faces by applying mathematical transforms to the original
face. They may do this if no bold/italic face is available or if they
can't find the right face.

As Andreas just said about fake small caps, "The result is
typographically ugly."

There's actually no technical reason to avoid fake bold and italics, by
the way, *if* *you* *do* *it* *right*. Such fake faces should be
converted to outlines on PDF output, so the RIP doesn't see them as text
at all. However, they're still downright ugly, so it's not something I
can see anybody wanting to implement.

The reason "fake" bold and italics got such an awful rep is because of
the braindead way that Quark (at least as of 4.0) italicises and bolds
fonts. It just appends "Bold" or "Italic" to the font name when it
exports to PostScript, but displays a faked preview on screen. If you
don't *have* the Bold/Italic variant, or your italic variant has a
different name (like Oblique) you then run into exciting PostScript
errors in printing and/or Acrobat distiller. That's why designers tend
to be nuts about picking the named bold/italic face directly, rather
than using the DTP app's bold/italic buttons. I only really understood
how this behaviour was completely distinct from and much stupider than
normal fake faces.

--
Craig Ringer