Fonts and Font Technology
From Scribus Documentation Project
Contents |
Fonts
Fonts are the key ingredient in print publishing. They display the “color” of the document − stately, playful, hard-sell, etc.
But they can also be difficult to deal with. There are a number of different font formats; some work better than others. There are hundreds of thousands of fonts available. Some of them are painstakingly crafted by professionals; others are amateur productions created with relatively inexpensive desktop tools. If you’re sending a job to press, you don’t want to find out when your brochure ships out that its fonts look awful. This chapter is intended to help guide you through the maze − what font formats work, or work better than others; what foundries produce fonts of reliable quality; and how to manage fonts and find characters.
Fonts as Intellectual Property
Font foundries claim that fonts are "intellectual property". Here from Adobe® is their wordENDNOTE on the subject:
Fonts are software, too. In fact each font is a short software program. Fonts are protected under intellectual property law and are subject to the same legal usage restrictions as other software.
- It is illegal to do the following:
- Share or copy fonts beyond what the license agreement allows
- Include a font copy with source files for output
- Service bureaus are under the same licensing agreements as individuals, and must own a license for viewing, editing, and printing any Adobe typeface.
- You cannot give typefaces to a service bureau that does not own valid licenses for these typefaces. Owning licenses for typefaces is an essential part of a service bureau’s business cost. If the service bureau already owns a valid typeface, you may provide your typefaces when requesting a print job.
- You may embed typefaces into documents only under certain circumstances. Adobe permits embedding certain typefaces into documents for the explicit purpose of viewing and printing only.
The web has many sites that describe font piracy policies; most are similar to Adobe’s. On the other hand, debate continues on exactly what it is about fonts that can be covered by copyright. Whether a claim like Adobe's is valid, will depend on the jurisdiction you are living in. For instance, while fonts seem to be recognized as "software" in U.S. case law, which means they are protected by copyright law, German courts refused to grant copyright protection for fonts, either as a piece of art or as software.
You embed fonts when you are printing to a PostScript file or creating a PDF file. The Scribus File > Preferences > Fonts dialog has check boxes if you want to embed the font. This is a difficult legal hurdle, and frankly, many well-meaning users ignore it.
There are many “free fonts” on the Web, and some of them are included in Scribus. Free fonts are not always completely free. Some have restrictions, such as not to be used in a commercial publication. Always read the licensing agreement.
You should also be aware of issues caused by many gratis fonts. They may look good on screen but bad when printed on a press. If you find some of these, it's better to delete them rather than suffer again. The corollary is to pay attention to which fonts you are using, so you can meaningfully identify these problems when they occur.
Kinds of Fonts
Here are some kinds of fonts you will find on your system:
- PostScript Type 1
- TrueType
- OpenType
PostScript Type 1 fontsENDNOTE were an important part of the Desktop Publishing revolution, along with the Apple Laserwriter, the first output device using these fonts. (Other font types are also defined in the PostScript language specification but are rarely encountered. The most common was Type 3, made by font-creation tools like Fontographer. Another, still encountered, is Type 42).
A PostScript Type 1 font has two major parts: the printer font and the screen bitmap font (plus information about font metrics and kerning). Font files with extensions .pfa and .pfb are Type 1 printer fonts. The only difference is how the data is stored, as ASCII or Binary.
TrueType fontsENDNOTE have been available for almost a decade, but they were generally scorned by pre-press users, who often reported production problems with them. This distaste has largely gone away as fonts and printer technology have improved. Like PostScript files, TrueType fonts are “scalable”, meaning that they are mathematical outlines that can be scaled in whatever increments your application supports, eg. 10.25 points, 10.2625 points (Note for trivia fans: the TrueType font project was initially code-named “bass” (as in the fish) because a bass can be scaled.). They stand alone – they are complete in themselves and don’t need separate screen and printer components. In general, they have been limited to 256 characters, but this has changed; see below on OpenType fonts.
OpenType,ENDNOTE a joint venture of Microsoft and Adobe, is an extension of the TrueType specification which adds support for Type 1 data. An OpenType font may contain TTF, Type 1, or both; the differences are resolved at output to a printer, Raster Image Processor (RIP), or PDF file. The development of OpenType was intended to end “font wars” between the two font developers. As implied by their components, OTF fonts are fully scalable.
There’s another important thing to know about OTF fonts. Other font formats are mostly limited to 256 characters; if you do an Insert > Glyph you will see no more than this in the palette. But OTF fonts have the capacity of containing many more characters. They are based on an emerging international standard called Unicode, which provides the possibility of accessing some 64,000 characters. So if you are using an OTF font and do an Insert Glyph, you will probably see a great many more characters than in TTF or other formats. If you are using Adobe fonts, those with “Pro” in their name include Central European (CU) glyphs; those with “Std” in the name do not.
OTF fonts may use a different approach than Type 1 or TrueType fonts to define the distance between two adjacent letters (kerning pairs). The freetype2 library used by by Scribus to access font informations can't read the OTF kerning informations, so that they won't be available in Scribus. There is, however, a workaround for the issue.
If you have FontForgeENDNOTE installed your system, you can open the OTF file with it.
- Go to File > Generate Fonts. This will bring up a file dialog.
- Select "OTF (CFF)" as the export format and click on "Options".
- Under "TrueType" check "OpenType" and "Old Style 'kern'" and click "OK".
- In the file dialog click "Save".
Now your OTF font contains kerning pairs that can be read by freetype2.
As noted, some TTF fonts are now also based on Unicode and contain more than 256 characters. There’s no easy way to tell this without some external application, but one good indicator is size: regular TrueType fonts are generally less than 100kb, while those based on Unicode may be 200 kb or larger. See, for example, the very nice Gentium fonts shown in our Quick Start Guide and also referenced in the next section; they are TrueType fonts, but contain hundreds of characters beyond the normal TrueType complement.
Be aware that the file names you see in your font library are not necessarily the same as you will see in Scribus font menus. The name displayed in the application is stored within the font itself. If you scroll to the far right of the available fonts list in Preferences/Fonts, you will see the name as it shows up in the source font folder. For example, what may show up in your font list as Nimbus Roman No9 L Regular may be stored as /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/URW/n0210031.pfb.
A variation in Adobe fonts is Multiple Master fonts. These allow you to use Adobe tools to create new “instances” of the base font by modifying one or more characters. They are not used much now; the tools for manipulating them are not available in Scribus. But the basic MM font can be converted to be used in Scribus with the command line utility mmpfbENDNOTE.
Mac Fonts
OS X knows two additional font types which are related to the old Macintosh specific "file forks". In short, files are divided into a data fork (the normal file) and additional resource forks. Traditionally, font data have been stored in the resource fork, but this practice isn't used much in OS X any more. Still, some fonts like “Times” continue to use this format:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 0 Mar 28 2005 Times LT MM
As you can see, the listing shows a size of 0 bytes, since the data fork is empty. These files can only be copied with special tools that convert it to BinHex format. There's the fonduENDNOTE utility, which helps to convert these fonts to formats that work on other platforms.
Later, Apple introduced the dfont format, which is basically the same format as resource fonts, except that all font data is in the data fork:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 1624875 Mar 21 2005 Times.dfont
While normal Linux distributions will probably not install those fonts, Scribus is able to use them if they are found in the font path. It is also possible to use fondu to convert these fonts to a suitable format for other platforms.
Newer fonts on OS X are all in OpenType or TrueType format, both of which work as-is on Linux/UNIX and Windows.
Typographic Niceties
“Artificial” fonts (Adobe calls them “faux” fonts) are mathematically modified to produce variations such as italic and bold. Some programs, particularly word processors, employ this technique; Scribus does not. This decision was made by the developers though some users still want artificial fonts available in Scribus. If your fonts do not have actual italic, bold, bold italic, condensed, etc., Scribus will not attempt to create them. Artificial fonts can cause enormous problems in a pre-press environment.
The techniques used by Scribus for subscript, superscript, outlined and small caps (available via the Properties Palette or Paragraph Styles) are safe but aesthetically not optimal. Especially with “scaling width of characters” you will have to experiment to see what’s acceptable.
Typographic purists will point out that, for example, small caps generated by scaling are not the same as “true drawn” small caps. Here’s an example: Note that in true small caps, the vertical elements are thicker than those in the Scribus scaled version. There are similar issues with other kinds of characters: ligatures, fractions, superscripts and subscripts. The Adobe OpenType User GuideENDNOTE describes them in detail. It’s possible to access these characters with Insert > Glyph, but that takes a lot more time than just typing. You have to really want them.
We have almost always used here the term “character” as it is popularly understood. But font experts will make a differentiation between “character” and “glyph”. An “A” is a character, in a sense, an abstraction. A glyph is the particular letterform(s) which make up that character in a particular font – for example a small Cap A or a “decorated” A. A character may be made up of more than one glyph, eg. an accented character, or two characters might be represented by a single ligature glyph.
ENDNOTE) http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/antipiracy/fonts.html
ENDNOTE) http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/font/T1_SPEC.PDF
ENDNOTE) http://developer.apple.com/fonts/TTRefMan/index.html
ENDNOTE) http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/opentype/index_spec.html
ENDNOTE) http://fontforge.sourceforge.net
ENDNOTE) http://www.lcdf.org/type/mmpfb.1.html
ENDNOTE) http://fondu.sourceforge.net/
ENDNOTE) http://www.adobe.com/type/opentype

