Fontmatrix

History

The logo of fontmatrix.be

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 were lost; fontmatrix.net has since been registered by scammers and has nothing to do with the project. 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.

The discussions of that time took place on the undertype-users mailing list. Its archive at Gna! went with the site; the messages from 2007 to 2017 are kept here, copied from The Mail Archive.

Pages of the old site

News, 2008–2011