Finally here’s an installer for Windows! It’s still not a font manager but yet a funny piece of software if you like to play with fonts.
We’re proud and scared altogether to announce a new public release of Fontmatrix.
This release is numbered 0.6.0. It replaces the Jurassic old 0.4.2. The 0.5.0 branch has been obsoleted as soon as it was branched almost a year ago. Trunk is now numbered 0.6.99.
Compared to 0.4.2, almost everything is new. From the storage backend to the preview engine, all has been reworked to offer a better user experience and prepare exciting future developments. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of changes:
For long time I did not use the playground because it was not as fun and easy to use after all. When I came back to it to add a few features, I thought I could as well make it fun again! I thought that what prevented me to really enjoy this place was the heavy process to get something on screen. Select a font, select a sentence or type it in the line edit and then push the button and Oh! the thing just goes nowhere you want it to be. So, while it still has some flaws, I redesigned it to act much friendly with me.
Select a font, click somewhere and type!
Sadly, I haven’t no time nor skill to write so much useful thing as documentation.
On the other hand, if most of the features are not obvious, at least they’re exposed in the user interface, thus "accessible" for the curious. Unfortunately, there is an area which is not at all exposed in the UI, the scripter. I won’t start document it right now! I just wanted to let you know the very first key (hm, 2 firsts!) of the Fontmatrix Python scripter.
print dir(Fontmatrix)
From LGM/Montréal
Thanks to Nicolas Spalinger, Debian, and thus Ubuntu users, will be able to easily follow latest developments in Fontmatrix by the help of brand new set of instructions. Enjoy… and please feedback.
…Mac users, there’s a new (Intel only) DMG. Here
You can thanks MrB for this.
One is an answer to a feature request : fm_match_raster.ogv
The second a pure bonus, a complete fontmatrix.conf :)
This has been the immediate concern of my teammates when I presented a video clip demonstrating an extract-font-from-pdf prototype.
To avoid any misconsceptions, I want to make things crystal clear right now. While it’s theorically possible to reuse such an extracted font, there are two issues to keep in mind:
It has been tough, it’s not at all finished, but here we are, we’ve plugged Fontmatrix into Python. Or the reverse, who knows?
The plan is now to first expose completely FontItem, which is the internal representation of a font, and the database wrapper. While it’s technically almost done, it’s now a matter of documenting the whole thing and let users play with it.
First of all, it worth noticing a couple of things about Fontmatrix under Linux. Fontmatrix relies on Fontconfig for font management. If you use an application which is not fc-aware (e.g. TeX), Fontmatrix can’t do anything for you. To be precise, Fontmatrix uses the fact that Fontconfig provides a user level configuration. What it does exactly is to symlink fonts which you want to activate into a directory, itself being declared in the user configuration file (~/.fonts.conf). Deactivating fonts is thus just a matter of unlinking these files from the specific directory.