[scribus] Fonts, worthy or not?

[Barry McKenna]

On 4/4/2011 12:28 PM, JLuc wrote:
> on Le 04/04/2011 20:05, Barry McKenna a écrit :
>> "Hinting" is the task of analyzing each glyph at each and
>> every point size and making sure that each *pixel* is
>> pushed/aligned in exactly the *best* location in the grid
>> of pixels that are available at each of the specific point
>> sizes.
>>

<snip>

>> I have been extremely hesitant to ask this question
>> because I don't want it to be taken as some kind of bash
>> about
>> Scribus, because to me, Scribus is one of the most
>> wonderful gifts I have ever received.
>
> I understand this hesitation. A wonderful gift of yours
> would be not to stop after the bashing, but to give hints
> and names of suitable fonts !
>
> JLuc
>
>
>
>> So, I'd be especially grateful if anyone would offer any
>> comments about the 'hinting' issue with most of the free
>> fonts
>> installed with Scribus and most of the free fonts offered
>> on the web.
>
>
>> (...and this doesn't even bring us up to the next task of
>> kerning, which can't be applied until each glyph at each
>> point
>> size is hinted...)
>>
>> Barry McKenna
>>

JLuc,

Unfortunately, I haven't got any suggestions for free fonts 
with good hints. I've yet to discover any, although I 
haven't spent a lot of time looking. What time I have 
invested has discouraged me from investing much more, 
because I happen to use the old standby Times Roman, for two 
reasons: I find it to be one of the best (readability) for 
body text. I've done some previewing from time to time at 
the major font foundries and bought some variations of Stone 
years ago. But those were in Type 1 format and not usable 
for me any more.

Eventually I'll be releasing a font with my scores of 
technical glyphs added in the Unicode Private Use area, but 
the regular text glyphs in my font won't do much for you 
because they're sans serif and very similar to Arial...

...so maybe now that I/we have raised this subject, people 
can now start including the issue of hinting when they talk 
about fonts here...Again, I've hesitated to raise this 
because online threads can start to get nasty 
sometimes...but then again, Scribus is not of much use 
without fonts. But, again, the mainstays that come with my 
Windows install do pretty well for me. I like Palatino and 
Georgia, but they don't look too nice when you have use a 
lot of numbers because of the descenders, in Palatino anyway...

Barry McKenna