Testing the Font Quality

From Scribus Documentation Project

Jump to: navigation, search

Fonts are often where the trouble starts and often ends in page layout. They are probably one of the leading troubles in pre-press in general and one of the sources of constant questions on the Scribus mailing list and IRC. A rough guess is 50% of the bug reports which are font related are problems with the fonts themselves.

High quality fonts are essential for reliable output, no matter which platform. Experience has shown that some freeware fonts do not follow normal font specifications for things like having a proper encoding, a missing or incorrectly formatted PostScript name, broken curves in individual glyphs and other defects.

Scribus does an initial "self-defense" test when starting to see if the available fonts have usable encodings, are scalable and have a correctly embedded PostScript name. Then, loading a document, Scribus uses freetype2, a software library to access fonts, to do a more extensive check of the requested fonts. If freetype2 cannot read the glyphs correctly, then usage of that particular font is disabled by Scribus. If some fonts fail to show up, it is possibly Scribus's font checking mechanism that has disabled them. You can make some basic checks by following the hints below.

Personal tools