Problem displaying URW Gothic

Previous topic - Next topic

northarch

I wanted to use the font "URW Gothic" in a Scribus document, but it looks like the spacing between letters is badly messed up. Some letters have large gaps between them, and others are almost overlapping. See attached screenshots.

However, if I go to Extras > Font Preview, the preview text displays without these problems.

Only the "Book" weight appears to be affected. Changing to "Demi" looks fine. The font also displays correctly in other software, like LibreWrite.

The font in question is a pre-installed font that came with my operating system (Fedora 36). If it's helpful, you can take a look at the urw-base35-gothic-fonts package on the Fedora website (https://packages.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/urw-base35-fonts/urw-base35-gothic-fonts/). The upstream font files appear to be found in this ArtifexSoftware Github repository (https://github.com/ArtifexSoftware/urw-base35-fonts). I am using Scribus 1.5.8, which appears to be the most recent version.

Is there anything I can do to try to troubleshoot this or resolve it? Is this a bug in Scribus, or a problem with the font?

Nermander

First question when it comes to fonts displaying strange: Did you try to export to a PDF and zooom in?


Aleks100

Which font format are you installing?
There's no reason to use anything other than OpenType font.

northarch

Ah, the package installs both the otf and t1 versions of the font. From looking at the Font Preview window, it appears that Scribus is choosing to use the t1 version. If otf is better supported, is there a way that I can force Scribus to use that version instead of t1 (without removing the file, since it's managed by the package)?

Ykonoclast

Quote from: northarch on January 02, 2023, 11:46:55 PMAh, the package installs both the otf and t1 versions of the font. From looking at the Font Preview window, it appears that Scribus is choosing to use the t1 version. If otf is better supported, is there a way that I can force Scribus to use that version instead of t1 (without removing the file, since it's managed by the package)?

I have the exact same problem with P052 (URW Palladio) which is another of the URW-base35 fonts.

Everything was working fine in Scribus 1.5.7 until I recently upgraded to Fedora37 and Scribus 1.5.8. Now the tracking is all other the place (weird spaces or, to the reverse, some words appear interlaced).

I observe the same phenomenon in font preview and preferences/fonts : type 1 is being used while the otf file is ignored. With, seemingly, no possibility to force Scribus to use the otf version.

I'm working on a fairly large document (170 pages, complex layout) and it would require a non-trivial amount of work to simply swap this font for another one. I'd really like a solution for this problem, Scribus seems to have broken compatibility with the URW-base35 packages between 1.5.7 and 1.5.8 and this severely impacts my work.

Is there a way to tell Scribus to simply use the otf file?