What is the difference between good and bad fonts?

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Revision as of 09:13, 12 February 2005 by Mhanski (talk | contribs)
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This article is part of the FAQ series.
Installation Usage PDF issues Fonts DTP Other

Here are some basic rules:

  • Use of Adope/PS fonts will usually result in better output(print), but mostly will look ugly on screen. OpenType tries to finally keep the

promises given with TrueType (equally good output on screen and in print), and OpenType is really better than TrueType. There are lots of TT fonts with printing issues, but you can find some really good ones as well. However, scribus will do a font check on startup, so you can be quite sure not to use "bad" fonts because they are ignored by scribus.

  • Quality can also be measured by the number of glyphs provided. Do you need to write Greek or Hebrew? Do you need German quotation marks,

umlauts? Good fonts usually have all or most of them (for that reason many of the fonts shipped with SuSE are quite useless, unless you only write English texts).

  • A good font family will offer you at least 3 varieties for regular, italic and bold fonts, because in real typesetting you don't use the

"fake" italics and bold letters as most people are used to from their word processor (that's, of course, not true for artistic or some ancient fonts).