Hi, my name is Hernán, from Rosario, Argentina. I have recently switch to linux (fedora) and have been trying to work (I'm a graphic designer) with inkscape, gimp and scribus.
Besides some problems I have been having with font matrix (can't get the font to show on any other aplication, I'm working on it), I have some questions regarding the way inkscape handles fonts and fonts variables.
The thing is, I have several fonts with different variables (such as thin, semibold, ect.) but in inkscape I can only choose to make them bold, and I'm not even sure it does that the right way (by selecting the bold variable). Is there any way of working with all the available font's variables?
Thanks beforehand.

I'm using 0.47 as i write this..there's better font support in later versions. However, Inkscape & Gimp are not likely to have support for such complex font features like variants, alternate glyphs, gadzooks etc. I know this is basic must have for typesetting but Inkscape is more a generic application that has extensive SVG support. Scribus should have much better support for these font features.
In Inkscape, for small bits of text you should be able to use whatever character map utility is in Fedora, to insert individual symbols from the font, thereby picking directly the glyphs from the font variant etc.

hergosum wrote:The thing is, I have several fonts with different variables (such as thin, semibold, ect.) but in inkscape I can only choose to make them bold, and I'm not even sure it does that the right way (by selecting the bold variable). Is there any way of working with all the available font's variables?

Use the dialog 'Text > Text and Font…' to have access to additional font styles recognized by Inkscape (the toolbar options of the text tool are limited to 'Bold' and 'Italic' buttons).

(Of course the corresponding font files need to be installed properly on your system first, to have Inkscape find and load them -> solve your font installation issues first. Inkscape doesn't have a custom font setup - it uses the system font config. Note also that you need to restart Inkscape after installing new fonts, or activating them in Font Matrix: Inkscape does not reload the fonts during runtime).

Thanks a lot for the answers, they help a lot; for some reason I overlooked the Text & Font option. It's all there alright.

I still haven't looked into my fontmatrix problem (no time at all) but as I'm working with just a couple of custom fonts I went with the manual installation for the moment.

Again, thanks for the help.