You might be confused momentarily by the fact that in neither the collection nor the font panes is there an incon for adding fonts - but all you need to do is drop and drag fonts from an open file manager window.
Below the two pre-defined collections, users can remove, enable, or disable collections for themselves.Īlternatively, users can work with individual fonts in the middle pane. In the left is a list of collections, including the two pre-defined collections, All Fonts and Systems at the top. Besides, font managers have long since become an accepted tool of design work, so there is something to be said for giving designers what they expect.Īlthough still in development, Font Manager organizes this practice effectively. Still, there is something to be said about not cluttering your system with thousands of fonts, especially when you have to scroll through a combo box to select them. At any rate, when two gigabytes of RAM are the norm, no one going to be very concerned about a few thousand kilobytes for font files - even if the files include extended support for Unicode characters. For this reason, GNU/Linux has less need for enabling and disabling fonts or arranging them in groups. To the best of my information, the X Window System simply accesses fonts as they are needed, rather than loading all of them permanently into memory (although I could be wrong). Its main way of doing so was to allow users to arrange fonts in groups - usually typefaces or the fonts used in a specific project.
Since Windows loads all installed fonts into memory, and memory was often at a premium in the past, one of the main purposes of the Adobe Type manager was to allow designers to efficiently enable and disable typefaces so as not to overwhelm the available memory. Like other font managers for GNU/Linux, Font Manager traces its designs back to the ancient Adobe Type Manager for Windows. It is designed for GNOME, but works with both KDE and Xfce so long as PyGTK is installed and you are willing to do without some links to GNOME-specific utilities (see below). Font Manager is a relatively new effort, but, at 0.3 release, is already showing the promise of becoming one of the simplest font managers available.įont Manager is available as source code, and in packages for Fedora 11 and Ubuntu 9.04.
In recent years, the situation has improved with applications like Fonty Python and Fontmatrix, but I'm always watching for new applications that will save the drudgery of manual installation and management. In fact, years ago, I often installed KDE primarily so I would have a graphical font manager. One key configuration tool that has been missing from GNOME for years is a font manager.