[scribus] Fwd: RE: PDF Studio Support Question

[David Burleigh]

On Fri, 2019-12-27 at 00:41 +0100, Bert Driehuis wrote:
> First of all, when forwarding HTML formatted mail to a mailing list,
> please consider removing the HTML makeup by pasting the text into
> Notepad (or it's nearest equivalent if you're using Linux or MacOS),
> and copying it back.
> 
> Putting the blame on Scribus is too easy. I am not aware of any bugs
> in Scribus's font embedding. I am, however, painfully aware of how
> hard font handling is, so I'm not excluding anything up front. I have
> downloaded a copy of Baker Signet Std Regular as an OTF off the first
> link that Google gave me, and ran it through FontForge's font
> validator. It gave around thirty warnings about missing points at
> extrema, and two about disordered and too-close elements in the
> BlueValues/OtherBlues arrays. Heaven knows if any of these trip up PDF
> Studio, or if the submitter used a different copy of Baker Signet than
> I found, or if, heaven forbids, Scribus tripped up on it. If I find a
> spare moment in the next days, I'll see if I can run the font through
> Google's validator, but with all the unknowns it's probably an
> exercise in futility.
> 
> The thing to be aware of is that font embedding is not a magic trick.
> It entails copying the font after removing the unneeded glyphs and
> unneeded tables, but the basic "garbage in, garbage out" rule still
> applies. Many fonts, including commercial fonts, and even including
> Adobe fonts, do contain encoding errors.
> 
> Tools exist to extract fonts from a PDF. The first step in further
> analyzing this issue is extracting the offending font from the PDF,
> and running a number of font validations on it. If I can get a copy of
> the troublesome PDF I'll be happy to take a look at it, but I'm not
> promising a turnaround time.
> 
> To the original reporter I'd say, "Embedding fonts is a black art
> which exposes you to all the vagaries of font coding. Outlining is
> always a safe choice, because it moves the font interpretation to your
> computer, where you have full control and visibility on the end
> result".
> 
> With kind regards,
> 
> Bert Driehuis
> 

Thank you, and sorry about the html. I know better.
It is as I thought about the fonts. I don't mind exporting them as curves. 
The only drawback is that the "text" in the resulting pdf cannot be 
indexed for my search engine to pick up, unless I use OCR to add a text
layer afterward. But actually most of the fonts I routinely use are
not displayed in PDF Studio, and I really don't have time to track down
all their irregularities, so I'll just live with the problem.

Really, the only reason I use PDF Studio is for its imposition
capabilities. I find PDF X-Change to be a better pdf editor, even though
I have to run it under Wine, but it lacks imposition tools. 
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