LWN: Comments on "A quick look at the new FontForge release"

A quick look at the new FontForge release

Sho — Sun, 21 Dec 2014 00:45:32 +0000

KDE has had a basic font manager in the System Settings application for about half a decade. Go to the "Font Installer" and enable management mode on the toolbar; it lets you preview fonts, group them into sets, load/unload them, find dupes and so on.

A quick look at the new FontForge release

monkeyiq — Fri, 19 Dec 2014 01:56:00 +0000

The collaborative-editing features are enabled by default for the osx download. The main dependencies for this are ZeroMQ and czmq. Note that you'll need a small patch to czmq to work on osx (preapplied to bundled czmq for osx download).

Also the osx build has breadpad enabled now, so all the osx users can contribute to improved stability of fontforge for all users :)

A quick look at the new FontForge release

yosch — Thu, 11 Dec 2014 11:49:23 +0000

You may want to give Font-Manager a try: https://code.google.com/p/font-manager/

gnome-font-viewer is still too scarce in exposing enough information from existing fonts (and has regressed from earlier features IMHO).

A quick look at the new FontForge release

Tara_Li — Thu, 11 Dec 2014 04:14:39 +0000

You tagged the big problem I have with FontMatrix - the font has to be installed before it can be previewed.

I've also looked at Fonty Python - and not been thrilled with the interface on it, either.

A quick look at the new FontForge release

kfiles — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 18:40:21 +0000

I use FontMatrix for that purpose. It gives previews of installed fonts, allows defining a currently active set, and finally, can export PDF proof sheets.

A quick look at the new FontForge release

Tara_Li — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 03:08:20 +0000

Nice - but how about Font Management software - that lets you see what's already on your system (be nice if it broke it up by type, as well), look through directories and view samples of the font before deciding whether to install it, search for duplicates (and maybe near-duplicates by rendering alpha upper and lower at a pixel rez and checking for similarity?), and is capable of helping it make sense when you have 1500+ TTF fonts installed on your system....