How do I prevent fonts from looking ugly in the exported PDF ?

Scribus is picky about the quality of the fonts you use and will automatically save font outlines in the PDF if the font is not to its liking. Font outlines look quite ugly in PFD viewers, particularly in Acrobat. Unfortunately it is not easy to determine if a font is good enough or not. Adding to the problem is the PDF export dialog with its confusing font tab. The problem is been worked on (see bugs.scribus.net issue 3701 and 2276).

If you see a font listed in the 'fonts to subset' list in the fonts tab of the PDF export dialog this font will be embedded as outline in the PDF and will look ugly in Acrobat. You'll have to use another font if you don't like this result. For starters try to use one of the following fonts. They don't have the problem:
 * Charis SIL
 * Gentium

At this time Scribus can not imbed OpenType fonts. Many of the fonts shipped with Windows are OpenType fonts with a .ttf extension. For this reason even very common fonts like Arial will be 'subset' and saved as outline !

The chapter Fonts in Depth provides excellent information about the problem.

--Markus 20:50, 23 October 2006 (CEST)