Font Preview and Font Management
From Scribus Documentation Project
Contents |
The Font Preview
Once you have installed more than a handful of fonts on your system, you may need to preview the fonts available to you. Scribus comes with a versatile font previewer. You will find it the Extras menu:
On top of the font list you see a search field. You can use it for searching the names of fonts. For instance, you can insert "garamond" if you want to list only fonts whose name include this string, or you can list all regular fonts by entering "regular". Note that the search isn't case sensitive.
Below the search field you see a font list. It consists of 5 columns:
- Font Name: This is a list of fonts available to Scribus. They are listed in alphabetical order, the names displayed are the ones stored in the font files. You can switch the display from ascending to descending by clicking on the caption of the column (the arrow will indicate the order).
- Doc: Fonts used in your document are marked with a check mark here.
- Type: Indicates the font type (Type 1, TrueType or OpenType).
- Subset: Shows whether the font is being subset during export to PostScript or PDF (see below).
- Access: Indicates whether a font is system-wide installed or only available to you.
Next you will see a field, in which the font is previewed by using a sample text. You can change the preview font size as well as the sample text. To change the sample text, you can edit it in the Text field. After you inserted the new text, you have to click on the “Set” button. If you want to return to the default sample text for your language, click on the button with the "Undo" arrow.
With the “Append” button you can add the font to a font selection in the Style menu, which we decided to ignore, as explained above.
Font Installation
Scribus will load and use fonts from three sources:
- System fonts are the fonts which are normally installed on your system. See below for installation instructions. When you install a new font, you need to restart Scribus, if you want to use it.
- The Scribus Preferences allow to specify additional font paths. If you put any font file in any directory of this path, Scribus will detect it on startup.
- Additionally, when you open a document, Scribus will look for its fonts in the same directory as the document. This makes it possible to work with documents that where collected for output, without installing additional fonts on your system.
Scribus is picky about fonts, so sometimes a font will not load owing to the font detection code finding internal errors in the font. This is not a bug, this is a feature. Scribus will not load and will ignore bitmap fonts (which are totally unsuitable for publishing), fonts with internal format errors (while most applications will use those fonts, Scribus rejects them since they tend to create havoc at the print office) and fonts without a Unicode encoding (most notorious examples are some Symbol fonts).
Linux/UNIX
The usual location for system-wide fonts in a Linux/UNIX environment are /usr/share/fonts and/or /usr/local/share/fonts. These fonts are available to all users. Individual users have their own private font directory, ~/.fonts. It's possible to install fonts by simply copying them manually to either of these directories. But there are graphical front ends for font installation as well.
KDE
For KDE users, the best way to install and delete fonts is to use the Font Installer which is part of the KDE Control Center, under Administration. If you are an ordinary user, you can use this installer to add and delete fonts in your own font directory. If you switch to Administrator Mode (requiring a password), you can install and delete fonts for all users.
In either mode, when you click on the “Add Fonts” button, you then navigate to a source of fonts. You can select individual or multiple fonts, then press the OK button. A progress bar charts the installation process, and reminds you at the end that the new fonts will probably not be available to open applications until you close them and restart. This is generally true of font-consuming applications. Note that when you start Scribus and look at the bottom of the “splash screen”, you will see a note about “initializing fonts”; this is the process by which Scribus comes to recognize newly-installed fonts. (The same is also true if you add a new font path to Scribus.)
Gnome
To install fonts in Gnome, open Nautilus and type "fonts:///" in the adress bar. Then you can copy your fonts to the folder.
Fontmatrix
As of this writing, a new font manager for Linux/UNIX, FontmatrixENDNOTE is evolving quickly, and it's already quite usable.
Its features are:
- It can read almost every bit of the internal workings of a font which are human readable, eg. copyright, encodings etc.
- It shows a sample text as a font preview.
- It can examine glyphs.
- It's possible to activate and deactivate fonts.
- It permits the tagging of fonts and to collect the tags.
- It can generate fontbooks (PDF files with font informations and sample text).
- It can start FontforgeENDNOTE to edit a font file.
Windows
According to Microsoft,ENDNOTE the recommended way to install new fonts in Windows is the following:
- Click "Run" in the Start menu.
- Type %windir%\fonts, and then click "OK" or press the "Enter" key.
- On the File menu, click "Install New Font".
- Select the source directory that contains the fonts you want to add.
- Select the font files you want to add. To select more than one font at a time, press and hold down the CTRL key while you click each font or press the Shift key to select a range of fonts.
- Check "Copy Fonts To Fonts Folder".
- Click OK.
There is, however, an easier way to install fonts in Windows, as you can just copy/move the font files to the folder Windows\Fonts on Windows XP or WINNT\Fonts on Windows 2000.
In both cases you need to have Administrator privileges.
Mac OS X
On OS X, Scribus automatically recognizes all fonts installed in the standard locations (/Library/Fonts, /System/Library/Fonts, /Users/name/Library/Fonts, /Network/Library/Fonts). To install a new font in Mac OS X, simply copy the font files to either of those directories. Additional font paths can be configured in Scribus' Preferences.
OS/2, eCOMstation
Not surprisingly, the OS/2 way of installing fonts is similar to Windows:
- Open the "OS/2 System" folder.
- Open the "System Setup" folder.
- Open "Font Palette" object.
- Select "Edit fonts".
- Click the "Add" button.
- In the resulting "Add Font" dialog, type the path to the folder that contains the font(s).
- Select any file in the left "Font files" pane or press Ctrl+/ to select all the font files.
- Click the "Add" button.
- Close the "Edit font" dialog and all other folders.
Font Management in Scribus
Scribus has its own internal font management tools. If you go the the "Fonts" dialog in the Preferences or the Document Setup (depending on whether you want to do document-specific font management or general font management in Scribus) you see three tabs.
The first tab is called “Available Fonts”. It lists all fonts Scribus found and accepted during launch. You may not see all of your installed fonts, depending on their quality. Scribus is quite picky with fonts, and it may reject some suspect files to prevent problems downstream.
The tab consists of 5 columns:
- Font Name: This is a list of fonts available to Scribus. They are listed in alphabetical order, the names displayed are the ones stored in the font files.
- Use Font: If you uncheck a font here, the font won't be available to you. By default, all fonts are available.
- Embed in: If you uncheck a font here, the font won't be embedded in PostScript files made with Scribus. By default, all fonts will be embedded.
- Subset: This option will prevent fonts from being embedded in PostScript and PDF files. You won't be able to select them for embedding in the PDF export dialog. By default, all OpenType fonts are selected for subsetting as they can't be embedded for technical reasons. Scribus will also subset fonts instead of embedding if they contain too many glyphs or if you try to embed TrueType fonts in PostScript.
- Path to Font File: As the caption says, you can see that path to the font file in this column.
The next tab is called “Font Substitution”. If you open a file that uses a font not available on your system, you have to substitute this foreign font with one from your collection. For that purpose, you will be shown a dialog that lets you choose a replacement for the original. If you don't make this replacement permanent, you will have to make the decision each time you open the document, which may not be what you want, considered the risk of destroying a layout by using a wrong font substitute. By checking “Make these substitutions permanent”, you will store them.
If you decide to make your substitutions permanent, this information will be stored in the Preferences and in the Document Setup. If you want to change the substitution for future documents, you have to do this in the Preferences. Changes in the Document Setup will only affect the current document.
To add new paths to fonts that aren't stored in the standard directories of your operating system, you have to use the tab Additional Paths. By clicking on “Add”, you open a file dialog to browse for the respective directory. This may be useful for testing a font before you install it on your system. Note that you can only add new font paths if no document is open.




