Fontmatrix

Re: [Undertype-users] Thought process for Font Management for Fontmatrix

Pierre Marchand · 

Hi Timothy,

> Perhaps this should be asked on the Dev list, but I think you guys monitor
> this list as well.

You’re in the right place, there’s no special Dev-list.

> I was just curious as to how Fontmatrix manages fonts? Does it just copy
> fonts to a temp folder for the user and then run fc-cache or does it use
> some other functionality to accomplish the same thing?

Font management  is very simple with Fontmatrix. First there is a dir where 
all imported fonts are copied ("$HOME/.fonts-reserved). In the same 
directory, there is the file "fonts.data" which stores tags, tags 
collections, sample text, etc. Activated fonts are just sym-linked 
in "$HOME/.fonts-managed" and have the tag "Activated_On" added where all 
others have "Activated_Off". Basically, it’s what I did before by hand. That 
works, but it will changed into something more sophisticated at some point.
I forgot to say, "$HOME/.fonts-managed" is added in a DIR element of 
your "$HOME/.fonts.conf" file, so all fontconfig aware apps can match against 
font files in managed directory.

> I need to do some more testing, but I tried loading up 768 OpenType fonts
> and Fontmatrix hangs up trying to activate them on Ubuntu Gutsy. Obviously
> that's a lot of fonts to handle and Extensis Suitcase has trouble
> activating that many fonts as well. Yet Linotype's Font Explorer X has no
> problems with them.

Thanks you for remind me to solve that problem :)
It’s quite trivial and I hope will be fixed tommorow. It comes from  
Fontmatrix is mostly intended to fine tune the fonts you make available and 
it rebuilds the tree list each time you activate a font file without thinking 
it can be a load of fonts to activate before the user wants to look at the 
tree. 
May I ask you why you want to install so much fonts when you have at hand a 
cool app like Fontmatrix which allow you to activate sets of fonts on demand?
half-joke but I’m also curious.

> I'm going to try the Postscript version of the fonts with Fontmatrix again
> and see if I get better results. I'll need Fontmatrix for temporarily
> adding customer supplied fonts when designing ads.

It’s exactly what is intended for. But don’t bother converting your fonts to 
postscript unless you work with OpenOffice.
If you use it with Scribus, just keep in mind 2 things:
1/ Your font will be changed into raw drawing at PDF export (outlined), which 
is very well for printing but is an issue for displaying at screen (no 
hinting and other goodies reserved for font rendering in PDF viewers).
2/ Scribus does NOT handle OpenType features. It means that if your font does 
not provide an old-style "kern" table but a "kern" feature in GPOS table, 
Freetype will say there’s no kerning pairs table and it will lead to some 
ugliness (if it’s for short text or titles,  you can tweak with manual 
tracking). The workaround is to rebuild the font in Fontforge, as an OTF(CFF) 
but with the "old-style kern table" option, thus you should be ok.

> Thanks for your input in advance...

Thanks to you. Don’t hesitate to ask how it works, to say how you want it to 
work :-) and to report issues here (no registering needed)  
https://gna.org/bugs/?func=additem&group=undertype

-- 
Pierre Marchand
http://www.oep-h.com


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