What is the difference between good and bad fonts?

Here are some basic rules:


 * Use of Adope/PS fonts will usually result in better output (print), but mostly will look ugly on screen (Scribus turns all fonts to vectors, so this doesn't affect display in Scribus). 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. Scribus will do a font check on startup that should eliminate most really faulty fonts, but you should still be careful with your font choices.


 * Quality can also be measured by the number of glyphs provided. Do you need to write Greek or Hebrew? Do you need German or French quotation marks, umlauts, or other accents? 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 and generally can'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). You should ideally also be able to get more weights, such as demibold, black, and light, to give you some more flexibility with headings and similar.


 * There are some more hints here: http://docs.scribus.net/index.php?lang=en&sm=setup&page=fonts2


 * You can find a whole bunch of in-depth articles here: http://desktoppub.about.com/od/fonttechnologies/