Use Scribus To Test Printed Output
A Indic free software activist commented on the lack of good indic fonts just yesterday:
Fonts: As on date, most distributions use a limited set of fonts, or, fonts arising from the same family (I hazard a guess that most of the time it is Lohit based anyway). Yet, there has been extensive work on Indic fonts which are adamantly refused to be let out under appropriate OSI compliant licenses. Who benefits from that stance ? Surely not the end-user who gets denied the chance to have a portfolio of fonts. …
DTP: Not much remains to say about this other than what I hear about Scribus folks being aware and responsive but await contributions on the domain of Indic enablement.
This suggests that Scribus should be the text layout engine for my printing test.
Another recent post mentioned some key features that free software typographic design needs to provide, including the old “metric equivalence” chestnut:
- Capability for “mirror printing†ie, the printed page should actually be like the way a normal printout when viewed in the mirror would look like
- Capability for treating a printable page into 2 software pages ie turn a A4 page into landscape mode and make two numbered physical pages out of that
- Handling of floating frames
- Metrically equivalent fonts for the traditionally well used ones
- Conversion from .p65 and like formats
- Handling of Indic properly
The Use Scribus To Test Printed Output by David Crossland, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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The blog entry with the old chestnut “Metrically equivalent fonts for the traditionally well used ones” was basically a transcript of a meeting with someone who has been using the computer for Bengali (India) writing. Being an author who deals with DTP folks, he’s concerned to a fascinating extent as to how his texts look, font kerning, handling of conjuncts. While I have asked for an elaboration on the phrase “Metrically equivalent fonts for the traditionally well used ones” I’d hazard a guess that he was looking at more variety of fonts which can replace the traditional Arial, Times New Roman and other commonly used but non-free Indic fonts.