[scribus] How to tell a font is print worthy?

[Gregory Pittman]

On 04/03/2011 01:18 PM, Jean Basile wrote:
>
>> OTOH, there are some "quality" fonts that look awful, and
>> should be rarely if ever used. :)
>
> Yes. Some 15 years ago when I have been looking at TeX and LaTeX I have stumbled upon the Palatino pack and font. And I have found it refreshing. I still can't give a decent argument why I dislike the Windows defaults (Arial/Times New Roman). Maybe it's because most prints go on with using them as defaults. And Palatino, with its round form, was able to help make my paper look larger while keeping the font (height) smaller than the others. Lately I like Gentium (the free font) as good - again, with no arguments to back it up. These days I got to look at some Adobe fonts and Jenson Light or Minion Italic really impressed me with their forms. So I'm thinking what's the science behind that feeling, how can one tell the difference between a good font and an excellent one?

There are so many fonts that you have many choices, and of course 
depending on your use, this may dictate only certain possibilities.

Personally, I hate to see fonts that are difficult to read, even if they 
are attractive. For large bodies of text, you need a font that does not 
stand out as if it was part of the information, but rather simply lets 
you most easily read the text.

One of the things you can do with Scribus is to set some pages in sample 
text, then change fonts, after which you should clearly see that some 
fonts work better than others. Some people prefer a Serif, some a Sans 
Serif font, but there are good choices in either category.

It looks like the site is under renovation, but you might check the Open 
Font Library:

http://openfontlibrary.org/wiki/Main_Page

Greg