Scribus Font Tools (2)

The Font Preview

Another useful tool in Scribus is the Font Preview, which is actually more capable than its title suggests. It is only available when a document is open, via Extras > Font Preview:

The Font Preview

As you can see, the dialog shows a list of all available fonts. Selecting a font will result in a preview in the lower part of the dialog. You can always change the font size and the sample text of the preview and later switch the settings back to the default values.

With many fonts installed, the “Quick Search” feature comes in handy, as it allows you to search for fonts, e.g. for those from a certain foundry (Adobe, Bitstream etc.) or for font styles (e.g. Italic). The only caveat is that Scribus only searches in the list of font names, so if a font’s style is “Condensed”, but the word “Condensed” isn’t part of the font’s name, searching for “Condensed” won’t list it.

Another useful feature of the Font Preview is the option “Show Extended Font Information”, which not only shows the same information as the “Available Fonts” tab in the Document Setup, but also provides a quick access to its features.

Fonts in Depth

Fonts are often where the trouble starts and ends in Desktop Publishing. They are one of the major reasons for serious problems in pre-press. A rough guess is that 50% of the font-related Scribus bug reports are problems with the fonts themselves. Moreover, a typical question asked by Scribus users is: “Scribus won’t use font X, but application Y and Z use it just fine. Why is this?”

Fundamentally, Scribus is extremely picky when it comes to fonts. Every time Scribus is being launched it does a “self-defense” test to see if the available fonts have usable encodings, are scalable and have a correctly embedded PostScript name. Then, loading a document, Scribus applies a more extensive check of the requested fonts to ensure that all the glyphs within a font can be accessed. If the glyphs cannot be read correctly, then usage of that particular font is disabled by Scribus. This is a feature, not a bug! There may be few applications, if any, that are less tolerant of fonts with defects than Scribus. Preventing the use of possibly defective fonts is, without question, essential for reliable output. While this may cause some annoyances or confusion for end users, rest assured that it avoids many potential problems down the road – like a PDF which crashes the imagesetting machine or refuses to output the file when you are printing 200,000 magazine covers. That, in the real world can cost hundreds, thousands or millions, depending on your local currency.

If you wonder why an installed font doesn’t show up in a Scribus font dialog, you can start Scribus from the command line, where you may see something like this:

Font /usr/local/share/fonts/URW/p052023l.pfb is broken, discarding it

It’s also important to note that Scribus does not create so-called “faux” Bold or Italic fonts. These are the bane of pre-press folks and have been known to cause issues when printing commercially, as they can result in degraded text quality. Thus, Scribus will not create an Italic version of a font if you really do not have an Italic font file for a given font family. Some page layout applications and word processors have chosen to offer this as a “feature”. The Scribus development team has made a conscious decision not to enable this.

Supported Font Formats

There’s no shortage of font file formats in modern computing, from bitmap fonts (which are still being used by the command line prompts of all current operating systems, or – at least partially – by the TeX typesetting system and its derivatives) to so-called web fonts – fonts that need not be available on your computer, but are being linked to just like images on websites. In professional printing, however, only three kinds of fonts have played a role. These are: PostScript, TrueType and OpenType fonts.

Trustworthy Fonts

High quality fonts are essential for reliable output, no matter which platform. It’s not an indication of snobbery if pre-press professionals are highly skeptical of freely downloaded shareware or freeware fonts. Experience has shown that many freeware fonts do not follow normal font specifications. Issues like improper encoding, a missing or incorrectly formatted PostScript name, broken curves in individual glyphs and other defects are not uncommon to many of those. Making good and reliable fonts for a professional printing environment is not easy and requires extensive QA testing. An example: Verdana from the MS web font collection took almost a year to create.

You can find a list of trustworthy fonts and font resources on the Scribus Wiki. This list continues be updated more or less regularly.