“Well, it was a long time coming, but I’ve been through the trenches and come up, sucking chest wound and all, with the Ars review of font management programs. I’ve also succeeded in not completely losing my mind while the developers updated the apps, nullifying half my criticisms in the process. Giving a lot of time to these programs in a production setting is crucial to seeing how they perform on a daily basis, and I am confident I’ve thrown enough varied scenarios at each to find out where they succeed and fail.”
Something that really pisses me off is the total lack of a decent Font Manager in Linux. I would have already written one if I only knew how to program.
Ain’t there anyone interested in doing such program? – i.e. do a program to browse fonts and install/unninstall them
The best I found in Linux was Opcion, but it doesn’t let you install or uninstall fonts.
Also, the best Font manager I ever used was Bitstream Font Navigator in Windows. Simple, intuitive and it does its job remarkably well.
now forgive a simple person like me for asking, but what do you need an application to install/remove fonts for? just copy the damn files to the font dirs
besides, if you really need a utility for something this simple, launch kde control center, go into system administration, then press the font installer, and press the “add fonts” button.
or simply open konqueror, browse to a directory holding a font, right click on it, then in the actions menu, there is an entry called “install”, if you press that one, a small dialog box will appear, which informs you that you have two choices, one is to install to your own personal font dir (for the user), or system wide, but that if you install system wide, you need the administrator password. then you simply press the button that suits your desire, and BOOM, the font is installed.
Font management is a lot more than just installing fonts (which you’d know if you’d read the incredibly detailed article!) Having thousands of fonts installed in the font directories just doesn’t scale, either for the system (which must search through these to do font matching), or for the user (which must search through all those to find a font to use). These font managers allow the user to rapidly search for and preview specific fonts, and allow the user to only have installed the fonts that applications are actively using.
Your simplicity is forgiven
I work at a newspaper as a graphic designer (among other titles). We have MANY fonts – so many, in fact, that we don’t keep them all activated, because finding the right font can be as hard as finding the one Vivaldi piece some 13 year old has on his 60gb iPod (yes, I’m an insensitive clod). As well, we occasionally have to temporarily install fonts used by advertisers that we wouldn’t normally have a license for.
Those are just a couple reasons that come to mind. I just got home about 40 minutes ago from a 15 hour work day at said newspaper, so I’m a little tired.. But trust me – we’d die without our font management software. We are currently using Font.. somethingerother on our creative machines (until we get our 2007 upgrade to Intel macs). Font Fusion is the new version of it, IIRC.
Anyway, on the subject of the article – I’ve been hoping and praying for a good server-based solution for font management for a year now.. Something that won’t break the bank, or our software (we use the Adobe family, Quark, and a few other pieces of software for our design, typesetting, and layout). It is incredibly difficult to manage our fonts across our setup, especially when our font licensing changes and we have to remove fonts we no longer have licenses for (across many workstations).
Then, of course, we have to deal with some artists who don’t understand that you can’t download any font off that cool font website and use it in a commercial print job because of licensing issues. Ugh. We can’t revoke their privs to install fonts, either, because we are down to 1 official IT guy (plus myself), and he can’t keep coming around to install/activate fonts every time we need one.
Well, it’d be nice to not have to spend 10 minutes with Google in order to figure out how to install fonts. I admit that despite some cursory efforts, I STILL don’t know how to properly install fonts manually.
Now, the last option you mention (installing fonts via a contextual menu) sounds fine. But for people who work with lots and lots of fonts, I would suspect that a Linux font manager is terribly important. Why would anyone switch to Linux if the stuff they have to do becomes *more* tedious? Philosphical arguments only go so far.
You install fonts in Linux the same way you do in OS X: drag them to the appropriate directory. It really doesn’t get muh easier than that…
But what is the “appropriate directory?” That is the question which, for some reason (call me lazy), Google has never answered.
~/.fonts shows up in the summary of the fifth search result for “ubuntu font directory”. This is slightly better than OS X, where ~/Library/Fonts shows up on the second page.
Alternatively, you can just double-click the font and press the ‘Install’ button, which will do it for you.
well, if you use konqueror, you can simply install as i described before, or slap in fonts:/ in the URL field, and kde will do the magic for you.
however you may also choose to copy into ~/.fonts/, for your local font stash, or somewhere X/fontconfig knows, most likely you will have /usr/share/fonts.
“now forgive a simple person like me for asking, but what do you need an application to install/remove fonts for? just copy the damn files to the font dirs
”
um….. well… it’s pretty obvious, you are not in to graphics!
testing a bug. apologies for the interruption.
Linotype’s FontExplorer X is the king for libraries/organisation on Mac OS X, and it’s free to boot, though I’ve never ever used the auto-activation stuff (well, I might have done; we share Photoshop PSDs around the office pretty regularly, so it may just have worked transparently). Being web-oriented, I don’t use InDesign, so I’ve no experience of the issues the reviewer found with it.
What the article didn’t cover is how the font management suites deal with the licenses of the fonts. Many small agencies have lots of fonts but not the right to use them at all or non-commercially only.
Do these font managers include rights management:
*list only free to use fonts or list only fonts that might be changed
*recommend look-a-like fonts with a license that is more free
in answer to all 3 answers to my post:
i did in fact read the article, and understand that what i said didnt describe features rivalling those font managers, HOWEVER, the post i replied to did not ask for these features, simply an application that can browse, install, and uninstall fonts, which is what i described can do
I haven’t seen one graphics/DTP-software to date that has included a good font browser/manager. Even inDesign which is supposed to be market leading has terrible font browser.
How come that they won’t bother with such an important feature? In most of them I can’t even browse through fonts by using the arrow keys, I have to open the font list and click on the font names to activate them. Terrible if you don’t know exactly what you are looking for.