On Thu, 2003-08-21 at 01:29, Craig Bradney wrote: > Hi there, > > First posting to the group, so firstly I have to say what a welcome > surprise it was when I found Scribus. I'm left with Adobe Indesign 2.02 > from a move to Linux. Indesign does the job I want pretty damn well but > as its the last Windows-based package I need, hopefully I can replace it > with Scribus soon if Scribus fits the bill. >
A lot depends on what you do in ID. There are a lot of common abilites like vector drawing tools and excellent PDF export. Certainly we have a better mailing list.<g> > First question for now though, is also about fonts. I have many truetype > fonts that KDE picks up fine but Scribus does not, all are within the > same truetype directory of my Gentoo installation. Ahh.. The Scribus can't find the fonts question: > Some missing ones > have spaces in the file names, some do not. Your lucky. Consider this v. 0.1 of the Fonts FAQ. The rules of fonts (generally) in Xfree86 and Scribus. 1. Font file extensions should be in lower case eg. ttf, pfb etc. On any platform - except - maybe - Cygwin. Always. Fix this first. Do this now. I'm not kidding. Your hair might catch on fire. You were warned.. I prefer the belt and suspenders approach, so make sure every font file name is in lower case. There was an earlier post about this today with a short script to fix this. 2. Within each directory with fonts, there should be *at least* a fonts.dir and for scalable fonts i.e. True Type of Type 1, there should always be a fonts.scale file, as well. fonts.alias might be there, but does not matter to Scribus, as there is lots of code to sniff out what fonts are really installed and where. If you are installing fonts via an rpm or script, the included fonts.dir and fonts.scale may over write and will not recognize other fonts in the same directory. You should have the Xfree-utils package or something similar which should have ttfmkfdir and mkfontdir. Older distros might also have mkfontscale. After installing TTF's: # ttfmkdir -o fonts.scale and then: # ttfmkdir -o fonts.dir In that order. 3. *Never*, ever have spaces in font names. Never. Ever. Underscore and dashes are acceptable. 4. You can use the /~.fonts mechanism in fontconfig, but often fonts.dir and fonts.scale are not refreshed by fontconfig. (Fixed in newer versions.) Things to avoid font hell in Linux and make them work optimally in Scribus: 1. For historical and practical reasons fonts have been installed in several different directories and can also be used across a network. Simpilfy your font paths and always install fonts as root into: /usr/X11/lib/fonts/TTF for True Type and /usr/X11/lib/fonts/Type1 for Type 1 fonts. 2. Eliminate un-needed font paths. 3. Copy fonts from your Windows directory, do not add extra font paths or symbolic links to a Windows partition. 4. I now always install fonts via the Kfontinstaller, as root and enable the option to create .afm files for all fonts. 5. Some of the apps which change the font path on the fly in Linux: Open OFfice, Star Office, Abiword, KDE - when launched. Open these before Scribus. There is a lot of info on font installation and how the font discovery mechanism in fontconfig works in the documentation - you did install the docs ? Hope that helps, Peter
