How do I prevent fonts from looking ugly in the exported PDF ?: Difference between revisions

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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 [http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=3701 3701] and [http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=2276 2276]).
Scribus is picky about the quality of the fonts you use and will not list a font that doesn't pass an automatic quality check. Also, to prevent exported PDF files from becoming too big, a font with more than 2048 glyphs will be converted to outlines by default and can't be embedded. Outlined fonts can look quite ugly in PDF viewers, particularly in Acrobat Reader. You can avoid the issue by preventing the conversion to outlines: Simply use ''File > Preferences > Fonts'', identify the font that's being converted to outlines and uncheck the box in the "Subset" column of the font tab.


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.
The chapter [http://docs.scribus.net/index.php?lang=en&page=fonts2 Fonts in Depth] provides further information about the problem.
For starters try to use one of the following fonts. They don't have the problem:
* [http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=CharisSIL_download Charis SIL]
* [http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=Gentium_download 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 [http://docs.scribus.net/index.php?lang=en&page=fonts2 Fonts in Depth] provides excellent information about the problem.


--[[User:Markus b|Markus]] 20:50, 23 October 2006 (CEST)
--[[User:Markus b|Markus]] 20:50, 23 October 2006 (CEST)

Latest revision as of 22:54, 30 September 2010

Scribus is picky about the quality of the fonts you use and will not list a font that doesn't pass an automatic quality check. Also, to prevent exported PDF files from becoming too big, a font with more than 2048 glyphs will be converted to outlines by default and can't be embedded. Outlined fonts can look quite ugly in PDF viewers, particularly in Acrobat Reader. You can avoid the issue by preventing the conversion to outlines: Simply use File > Preferences > Fonts, identify the font that's being converted to outlines and uncheck the box in the "Subset" column of the font tab.

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

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