Lowercase l's in different font from the rest after exporting to PDF

[Fiolsvinn]

Hi hi

If that problem came up already, I apologise, but I genuinely couldn't possibly tell what to look up for that...

So, I have recently made a document with Scribus, but after exporting it to PDF, somehow, most lowercase l characters (not all) turned out thicker, standing out like a sore thumb. One or two turned out as intended, and I have exactly one case of an uppercase i turning thick.
The font family I use is Lato, with issues arising with the Regular and Semibold members of the family.
Does anyone know how to fix that issue? I have attached an example, with the l's in "surveillance" being too thick, and the one in "accueil" being one of the rare instances that turned out correctly.

[AdmFubar]

does the thicker version of the letter 'l' occur only when placed together? Also need to know the version of scribus, the font, and os.

[Fiolsvinn]

No, it also occurs when the l is alone, like in "gmail" or "livre", and I also have an instance of two l's put together that turned out fine. I cannot discern any particular reason why some are thick and some are not, and believe me, I have solid pattern detection skills. Upon further inspection, I also have exactly three uppercase i in my file, and all are thick.
I am using Scribus version 1.4.8 on Windows, and the font used is Lato as previously mentioned, in Regular and Semibold style. Thanks for looking into it. If needed, I can send the file in question, though, well, it's my resume, and it's full of personal information, so I would rather not.

[AdmFubar]

this might be an issue with the version you are using, upgrade to the 1.5.x version if you can. the issue might be resolved, with in the new version.if not reproduce the issue in a new document and post that.
also you may want to start scribus via the command line to get any error output to share as well. It may just be a font issue.

[AdmFubar]

Is this issue in the printed output of the pdf or just the screen display? I think all you might be seeing is distortion from the magnification level from your display. Have you zoomed in on the pdf? if so was the issue still there?
I noted some thickening of an 'l', but that disappeared upon zooming in closer.  What pdf reader are you using?

[Fiolsvinn]

I have installed version 1.5.8, and... that fixed it indeed, thanks. To think I wanted to stick to the stable branch out of safety...

I figure it's not much use anymore, but yes, zooming on the PDF did "fix" the l's thickness... but the issue remained while printing on paper (already tested before coming to the forums), and well, what recruiter would think "this is ugly, lemme zoom on that to see if it gets better". That was using Acrobat Reader, so I figure the error would've been reproduced on their end too.

But ah well, now the issue is fixed, and hopefully it won't come up again. I am still curious as to what happened here, so if anyone could spare a moment to explain what (possibly) was causing this, I would appreciate it.

[AdmFubar]

I had found the Lato font online, and loaded it into fontforge, which reported two issues with the font, not sure if those are the cause or not. I'd find a similar font and see if issue persists, preferable a font from the same designer from the same time period.

[Nermander]

The issue is often due to loss of font hinting and usually only shows on screen in normal reading size. Printing or zooming in would show it correct in that case.

Font hinting is data to help display the text in lower resolution, and is part of the font. But I think that if the text is for example converted to outlines (and I think older versions of Scrbius did that when subsetting) the hinting may be lost.

This is a good article about it
https://www.typotheque.com/articles/hinting

[MrB]

To think I wanted to stick to the stable branch out of safety...

We're preparing the release of 1.6.0 for the next few months. 1.5.8+ is much more stable than 1.4.8