[scribus] OpenType features

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sat, 14 Sep 2013 11:44:06 -0300
Gabriel Grosso <ggrosso.dg at gmail.com> dijo:

>I'm wondering if Scribus support the use of true small capitals -if the
>typography has ones- or if they're created by the program itself. I've
>seen a thread long ago about this and it has been reported as a
>bug<http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=1413>and a future
>implementation in version 1.3 -long ago-.
>
>Also i have an issue when trying to use special characters like old
>style figures -small caps numbers-. Fontmatrix detects it as 'Unmapped
>glyph' and also in Scribus i can't insert them via Glyphs.
>
>I've read some topics about OpenType in GNU/Linux can be accesed with
>XeTeX or LuaTeX, but i have zero experience working with that.

The first step is to verify that your font has true small caps,
ligatures, old style numerals, etc. and that they are encoded with the
correct Unicode values. 

Assuming that your font has them, then the only way to use them
currently in Scribus is to insert them one at a time manually. As far
as I know the only program that can use them automatically (as opposed
to just resizing regular caps) is InDesign. I read somewhere that
QuarkXPress can do so also, but I can't verify that.

Automatically using alternate glyphs in OpenType fonts has been a
feature request since at least 2006:

http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=1413

I should add that there also exists Graphite, an extension toolbar for
Libre/OpenOffice, which can do this, but it works only with a couple of
specially created TrueType fonts (e.g., LinuxLibertine-G). Graphite is
an interesting tool, but as far as I can tell it is a dead end
technology.