Italic update?

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JohnJR

Hi,

I would like some Italics please.  So, I look to see which fonts have italics that are supported, I assume because they are listed in Font Preview as, for example I believe, say "Times Roman-Italic" and choose that font for highlighted text--nothing happens.  Same routine in the properties palette: choose Font, then Regular, Bold, Italic.  Select Italic--nothing happens.  Go back and its switched itself to Regular even though Italic is listed as an option.

Is there a keyboard path to access italics that are supported?  1.4.6 on OS X 10.11.6

So does Scribus have any supported fonts that are italic?  Or no.  If so, I would like a serif-ed font name please.

Thank you,











So does Scribus have any supported fonts that are italic?  Or no.  If so, I would like a serif-ed font name please.

utnik

hi john

scribus doesn't generate false italics, but as long as your font comes with italics, you can use them – i never saw a problem with this.
(as the 'italic' cut is another font than 'regular', make sure it is activated in the 'font' tab of the document settings...)

utnik

CGood

#2
In 1.4.6 open a new Text Frame and put some dummy text in it to experiment.

In your text frame, double click to put the attention of Scribus into the text itself - you'll see the cursor blinking within the text. (The frame border will be a plain red line.)

Click-drag to select just a few words you'd like to italicize.

Have open your properties Palette -  (F2) or Windows>>>Properties.

Go to the Text panel.

See the Font name dropdown at the top of that panel.

Immediately below, see a second drop down that shows something like Regular, or Bold...

Click on that drop down to open it and you'll find the variants available from within that font. Presuming that font you have chosen has a full set of weights and italics, you should see a listing of all of them.

Click on one of them and you'll see your selected text change to Italics, or whatever variant you have chosen.

EDIT: All this depends upon your chosen font having a set of Italics. As utnik says, Scribus will not phony up fake Italics. They must be part of your font.

JohnJR

Hi,

Dammit, dammit, dammit, and Dang-Nit.  Originally with Times-Roman, which I knew had an Italics options selection for text already entered that I wished to italicize, I selected the frame and activated the cursor, selected the Italics option in the properties palette--nothing happened.  I deleted the text and re-typed it back in with Italics selected--non appeared.

I glanced back at the palette and noted the Italics selection had auto-reverted back to the default Regular.  I stopped entering text and re-selected the Italics option again in the palette and began typing, again; text still entered as Regular even though the Italics option, now, remained displayed as selected--no auto-revert back to Regular.

This come hell or high-water.  I bailed out without seeing a single italicized letter.  I began to feel they couldn't exist in Scribus under the fake-italics rule.

But wait!  Per your suggestion, I re-selected the frame and highlighted existing text with the cursor before I choosing the Italics option: voila, bang, wow Italics.  Furthermore, if I typed in additional text, wow, they too were Italics.

Thus it looks like the moral of the story is: if you would like italicized text, don't start by selecting Italics then typing from scratch (even in an empty frame) and expect to see any.  Enter your text as default Regular and only then highlight the desired text.  With it highlighted, go back into the palette and re-select the Italics option (if offered).  Then you should expect to see some.

Originally, aside from the false-italics rule, I thought within the enormous Scribus fonts galaxy, Italics might exist somewhere as their own stand alone sets. For example good old Baskerville-Italic can be seen in the Font Preview window (Extras >) with sample text included, but heaven help you in the properties palette.

Given that and perhaps you might be more versed in the plethora of fonts within Scribus than amateurs; might you have a plate full of fonts with Italics and a salad fork please?

Thank you,

CGood

Most font sets have Italics.

What sorts of fonts would you like? I have amassed and combed through a collection of some hundreds of free fonts from OK to quite good and might be able to point you to a worthy font with the characteristics you seek.

JohnJR

Hi CGood,

Thanks, I didn't mean to make a fuss.  I was imagining only inside the vast array of Scribus fonts.  It also seems the real italic choices are not within Font Preview, but within the Properties palette, Baskerville being one example.  Italic fonts available in the former don't translate to availability in the latter.  If a handful of versatile fonts you might know of reside in that thicket it would be fun to know.  I bet therein are a lot of alphabet systems in many languages with their own variant expressions that are very beautiful in their own right.  It might be fun someday to put them in collections for display in the Metropolitan Museum of Scribus Fonts.

Thanks,

CGood

I'm not sure what you mean by " vast array of Scribus fonts"  I may need to learn what fonts come with Scribus. I had assumed that the fonts I had came with Linux or perhaps LibreOffice.

I have since downloaded and kept maybe three or four hundred free fonts.

I can suggest you try:
Accanthis, Aileron, Alegreya and Alegreya Sans, Aurelis, Cardo, Charis, Coelalcanth, Cooper Hewitt, Cormorant, the Deja Vu family, EB Garamond, Encode Sans, Exo, the Fira families, Gentium, Junicode, Kelvinch, Lato, Linux Libertine, the Neuton family, NewG8, Noticia, the Nunito family, Open Sans, Playfair, Prompt, Proza Libre, the PT family, Raleway, Rising Sun, Roboto, Sinkin Sans, the Source family, the Ubuntu family, the URW free fonts family.

There are many more good free fonts (and endless awful ones)  but these are a few you might want to look at.

Check out fontsquirrel.com losttype.com, omnibus-type.com, theleagueofmovabletype.com.

JohnJR

Hi CGood,

What I meant by the "vast array of Scribus fonts" were only those fonts Shown in Extras > Font Preview, but perhaps more restrictively, only those fonts that have that option inside the Properties palette.  So far I've only found the battle-wary, tried-and-true Times Roman that can put italics on the page.  I did note Cambria has an italics set, but does it show up in the Properties palette?  I didn't check.

I note that Fonts Preview has a couple of buttons that are labeled Set and Default respectively.  I wonder if Set might alert the Properties palette to incorporate the italics option in its options window where italics would actually be deployed in a document.  I didn't experiment with it.

Yikes! your suggestions to try out are rich enough to keep me employed in Scribus font windows for some time.  Thanks for those.

John

CGood


GarryP

Scribus doesn't "own" or "have" any fonts; it only uses the fonts which are installed on your machine. How you get fonts installed depends on your OS and is described well elsewhere on the web.

If you want to use an italic version of a font - or a bold version, or whatever other variant - in Scribus you need to have an italic version - or whatever variant - of the font installed (or in the same folder as the document you're working on).

If you have an italic version of the font installed and it's not available from the PP then either it has been manually disabled in the Fonts Preview dialog or Scribus has seen a problem with the font and has automatically disabled it. (The reasons for automatic disablement are too varied to go into here.) Fonts that have been disabled in Scribus - either manually or automatically - are still available to other applications, they're just not available in Scribus.

The "Set" and "Default" buttons in Fonts Preview are just there to change the preview text. "Set" makes the preview use the sample text typed in the nearby text box and "Default" makes the preview use a default sample text. They have no other purpose, as far as I know.

More font resources you can try:
* https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Useful_Free_Resources
* https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Font_Tools_and_Resources

JohnJR

Hi Folks,

So all the fonts given me in either Fonts Preview or Properties Palette don't reside anywhere in Scribus itself but only reflect what Mr. and Mrs. Apple have handed me?

Back to Yikes!  If that's all I get, there is still more exploring than I'm likely to do in a lifetime.  If I have two or three days, or a new need, I'll look at what's been given to me first.  However I appreciate all your suggestions and I bet some of them show example alphabets right along side the font names, just like the old font books I first had in college five decades ago.

Thanks,

CGood

There are font manager apps that can help visualize your collection of native Apple fonts. I'm not a Mac user so cannot point you to the best font managers but they are there, somewhere in Mac-Land.

To get a really good look at the fonts you have, you can also make a text frame in Scribus and enter characters like the below into it and you will quickly see what sort of glyphs are available in a particular font.

AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz1234567890 , . ! ; : ' " - @ # ? ^ & * () {} [] _ ...  ° © ® ± ¶ ‐ ‑ ‒ – — ― — – † ‡  ™ № ☞ fi fl ff ffi ffl ſt st € ¢ £ ¥ § $ ¢ £ ¥+ = % x <> ≠ ≤ ≥ ≈ | \ / ⁄ ⅟  ½ ↉ ⅓ ⅔ ¼ ¾ ⅕ ⅖ ⅗ ⅘ ⅙ ⅚ ⅐ ⅛ ⅜ ⅝ ⅞ ⅑ ⅒ ∫ π Ω ∏ ∑ ∞ ∆ ℵ ↈ Ⅰ Ⅱ Ⅲ Ⅳ Ⅴ Ⅵ Ⅶ Ⅷ Ⅸ Ⅹ Ⅺ Ⅻ Ⅼ Ⅽ Ⅾ Ⅿ ⅰ ⅱ ⅲ ⅳ ⅴ ⅵ ⅶ ⅷ ⅸ ⅹ ⅺ ⅻ ∈ ∋ ∌ ⊆ ⊇ ∬ ∭ ∮

Once you have those characters in a frame, click through fonts and you'll see things you did not expect. You will see that most fonts do not have every character you might desire. Since Scribus will not phony stuff up or automatically substitute a character from another font unbidden, missing characters will show up as "tofu" squares or gaps.

If you are publishing something in Cyrillic or whatever, construct your own test set of characters and you'll soon see the fonts that have what you need.

utnik

hi john

take a look at 'font book' (the official font manager of osx) inside your 'applications' folder...

utnik

GarryP

Just to quickly add to utnik's advice on using Font Book on OS X, you can also use it to check that the font you're using has been designed properly - not all fonts are created equal - and to see if you have any duplicates (useful after an OS upgrade). There are plenty of articles on the web showing you how to do this.

You can also use Font Book to arrange your fonts into categories so you can find what you want more easily but this can be a long manual job - best started as soon as possible - and isn't reflected in Scribus (you will still get the normal alphabetical list). Again, many articles on the web.

If you ever seem to have a problem using a particular font, look in Font Book first to see if the problem is with the font rather than Scribus. If Font Book tells you that there may be a problem with the font, try finding another version somewhere on the web (see the lists of resources I posted earlier).

JohnJR

Hi Folks,

Took your suggestions and opened the apple "Font Book" application.  Woof, its a great help for anyone that is only mildly interested in seeing fonts because of the organizing and quick-review features.

Thanks,