With Scribus in its latest incarnations, you can seriously consider to turn a Linux box into a DTP workstation. However, once we have the engine, we need gasoline, and the gasoline of DTP is fonts.

Note that when we say fonts, we think of more than the barely 40 not-so-bad fonts available for free or even "libre". Also note that there's no problem for Linux in general to handle a huge amount of fonts, as it lets applications take care of that, so problems rather lie at the usability level.

Anyway, the first time I managed to copy the Adobe Fonts Collection to my $home/.fonts directory and ran Scribus, I immediatly understood I will need a font manager. The two main reasons are: First, it's a real pain to select a font in a list containing hundreds of items - and I think it could be easily worked around with a decent selection widget. Second, I want to know more about my fonts than just their name, style and a short preview. Since Fontmatrix is available, it happens that I just browse my fonts to see, to learn, to let them dwell in my mind.

Back to the problem: What are font managers for Linux? I don't think about a specific font manager here, there is Fontconfig and that's it. What we want is a cool front-end that makes managing that bunch of font files a pleasure. Yes there are Hamster, Fontlinge and FontyPython. To be honest, only FontyPython could be labelled as "cool", even though I never managed to get it up and running!

So the question arose: Where are cool (this is important!) graphical applications to manage my installed fonts?

In November 2007, the answer was: Nowhere. At that time I didn't know that KFontInstaller had been improved so much for KDE4, so I just coded something. Quick & dirty, as usual, but it worked. In the long run, I think of Fontmatrix as a pure font manager - for tagging and activating fonts - will vanish once someone writes the perfect font selection widget and makes it available for DTP applications. On the other hand, its educational purpose should grow until it becomes the main purpose of the Fontmatrix project. Educational in many ways. It shows glyphs and extracts informations from font files. It will help to gain knowledge about digital fonts and typography, at first online, worked on by the community. It's an experimental field for glyphs and text rendering.

For short term changes, just stay tuned!