[scribus] Launching with "scribus -fi"

[John Culleton]

On Thursday 28 October 2010 21:08:20 Gregory Pittman wrote:
> On 10/28/2010 08:46 PM, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> > One of the tidbits that I discovered while reading the Scribus
> > manual was that launching Scribus from the command line with
> > "scribus -fi" would list all installed fonts and duplicates. I
> > have a lot of fonts installed on my Fedora 11 x86_64 computer,
> > and I'm pretty sure I have at least a few duplicates. So I jumped
> > at the opportunity to get a list of duplicates in order to do a
> > little housecleaning.
> >
> > Unfortunately, although I made the terminal window as tall as I
> > could, it listed too many and the top portion was cut off.
> > However, there is an even bigger puzzle. In the list of
> > duplicates I found dozens and dozens of lines like the following
> > two (sorry about the word wrap in the e-mail):
> >
> > Loading font /home/jjj/.fonts/KozMinStd-ExtraLight.otf (found
> > using fontconfig)
> >
> > Font /home/jjj/.fonts/KozMinStd-ExtraLight.otf(1) is
> > duplicate of /home/jjj/.fonts/KozMinStd-ExtraLight.otf(1)
>
> If you're using KDE or Gnome, try following the instructions in the
> manual about managing fonts (p 185-186). You also might try
> fontmatrix for font management.
>
> Greg

I tried 
 scribus -fi 2>fontlister
to the output into a file for further massaging and got some 
interesting results. The fonts in my texlive area are not listed. I 
don't think the fonts that come with Ghostscript are 
listed either. The same font in ttf and Type 1 forms are considered as 
duplicates. 

I read the file with
less fontlister

wc fontlister 
tells me that there are 614 fonts and dupes  findable by Scribus. 

grep  dupli fontlister 
gives a listing of  221 fonts listed as dupes in fontlister.  

The question arises, if font x is found in both TTF and Type 1 forms 
which should I keep? I'll keep all otf fonts in any case since that is 
the apparent font format of the future. 

There are many fonts on my system representing languages from the 
Indian Subcontinent.  Since I don't work in those languages I will 
delete them to reduce clutter. 

Here is a weird line I came across:
 
Font /usr/share/fonts/TTF/georgia.ttf(1) is duplicate of 
/usr/share/fonts/TTF/georgia.ttf(1)

There is only 1 such font in that folder.  So the font finding and dupe 
finding mechanism is imperfect.

If one is listing fonts in a terminal window then  saving them in a 
file and listing that file with "less" is convenient. Since the font 
messages are given as error messages the line listed above
scribus -fi 2>fontlister
is appropriate for creating that file. 

Life becomes both easier and more fun if you learn the command line 
tools of Linux. I used wc, grep, less and gvim in the above exercises.
-- 
John Culleton, Wexford Press
"Create Book Covers with Scribus" $5.95 at
http://www.booklocker.com/books/4055.html

Free eps format barcode: http://www.tux.org/~milgram/bookland/