How to ad Chinese fonts to Scribus?

Discussion Open Forum
1

Does anyone know how to add Chinese fonts to scribus? I have tried following the wiki on the subject which is very straight forward, but for some reason it cannot see the .ttf fonts when I go to that pathway. Any help would be appreciated.

2

my scribus using Zhuyin fonts.

I didn’t do anything special actually, I turn it on, and my system fonts are already in there. I am running Ubuntu.

I place all my fonts in /usr/share/fonts/truetype/

and made sure I ran
sudo fc-cache -fv

after I put new fonts in there.

I think the biggest problem with scribus is that it doesn’t use system font cache, which means it will only use the glyphs available in the font you’ve selected. For example, when you select say “Arial” for some CJK characters in other Linux tools, the font cache will notice this font doesn’t have glyphs for these characters, and display them in a font that has them.

Some supplementary fonts depend on this feature, so they only have a very small subset of fonts to go with the main font. But in Scribus, it will just show empty boxes, because it doesn’t seem to be smart enough. It also doesn’t support CJK Unicode beyond the B extension.

3

Thanks a lot hansioux. It’s all sounds pretty technical but hopefully I can work it out.

4

I installed 5 supposedly Trad Chinese ttf fonts into Windows last month (via Control Panel, Fonts) and then Scribus only picked up one of them up after a reboot.
Also, some of the more uncommon Chinese chars (I was doing a list of names) couldn’t be displayed in the new font, just left a blank space. So I had to revert to one of the MS Chinese fonts for these.

5

Hi Nuit,

Which one did Scribus find? I have downloaded a number of fonts. I can see them in the fonts folder but when I add that as a pathway I can see nothing in there to select.

Thanks.

6

JetLink BoldRightPop Regular - download here
http://www.freechinesefont.com/category/pop/page/2/

and my fallback font was KaiTi Regular (I might have installed that one too, come to think of it. There was a lot of faffing around).

I didn’t need to add a path to Scribus, the application just picked the font up once it had been installed into Windows.

7

Thanks for your help guys. I worked it all out and went to the printers today. In the end, I had to teach the printer how to do it. – Dumber and Dumberer