History

Pierre Marchand started Fontmatrix in October 2007, as a font manager for Scribus users on Linux. It grew out of Undertype, a larger typography project hosted at Gna!, and was developed there in Subversion with Alexandre Prokoudine, Riku Leino, Vladimir Savic, Peter Linnell, Parag Nemade, Alessandro Rimoldi and others; Jean Ghali made the early Windows builds. Releases 0.3, 0.4 and 0.6 followed between 2008 and 2009; 0.6.0 was the last release of that time.

After 2011 the project went quiet. The code moved to GitHub, where Alexandre Prokoudine and a few contributors kept it building (0.9.100 in 2020), and from 2026 it was ported to Qt 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 and released as Fontmatrix 1.0.0. It is maintained by Blagovest Petrov.

The project’s first home was fontmatrix.net, later fontmatrix.be. Both domains are gone, but the Internet Archive kept the pages. They are collected here with their original text; download links point to the archived files, and the videos, which were hosted on blip.tv, are lost.

Pages of the old site

• Fontmatrix genesis

  Why Pierre Marchand wrote Fontmatrix.

• About

  What Fontmatrix was meant to be, with Haralambous on font management.

• Screenshots

  Fontmatrix 0.5–0.6, as it looked in 2008.

• Download

  Source releases, Linux packages and Subversion, 2008–2011.

• Contact

  Bug tracker, mailing list and IRC channel of the time.

• Frequently asked questions

  How to activate and deactivate a font.

• Manual

  The introduction and chapter plan of the first manual.

• ToDo list

  Plans from March 2008.

• What others are saying

  Early reviews by Bruce Byfield and Peter Linnell.

News, 2008–2011

• 16 Mar 2011 A quick update on state of affairs
• 10 Aug 2009 Weeks made a month
• 3 Jul 2009 Fontmatrix 0.6.0
• 30 Jun 2009 play with the playground
• 19 May 2009 Some things deserve documentation
• 10 May 2009 Debian users get help!
• 7 May 2009 Be happy…
• 9 Apr 2009 Two for one in a short post
• 26 Feb 2009 Piracy?
• 15 Feb 2009 Finally, Python
• 20 Dec 2008 system fonts
• 7 Dec 2008 And now for Windows
• 3 Dec 2008 A new build for Mac users
• 25 Nov 2008 Glyphs comparison video
• 21 Nov 2008 PANOSE video
• 11 Nov 2008 NEW! Fontmatrix at Ohloh.
• 6 Apr 2008 Release 0.4 is out in the wild!
• 1 Apr 2008 Libre Graphics Meeting needs you
• 1 Feb 2008 Fontmatrix 0.3
• 1 Feb 2008 Note for ArchLinux