Fontmatrix

Fontmatrix 0.3

Undated

If your lucky, your distro has an up to date package. Otherwise, just take the more recent source package here.

The main idea is “0.3.0 is far better than 0.2.0”, here are some points to support this idea.

We’ve invited Harfbuzz to the party

Harfbuzz is a library to discover and use advance OpenType features and its aim is to enable better support for non-Latin languages. At the moment, only the basic transformations are working. Moreover, non-latin languages handling is not yet functionnal. For now, you can see and preview features present in OpenType GPOS and GSUB tables. If you just arrived from Mars, it means giving access to ligatures, optical small caps, old style figures and generally what’s called “fine typography” - even if it will be you cannot enjoy it in all applications currently.

Why Harfbuzz? It’s yet part of Pango and Qt and aimed to be the standard FLOSS text layout component. Moreover, Scribus team wants it for its non-latin rendering engine and Fontmatrix is definitly the Scribus’ user font manager :) But supporting other layout engines such as ICU or M17 wont be forgotten, just a matter of spare time.

Freetype Rendering

As expected and experienced by early users of Fontmatrix, rendering glyphs at small size without a specific engine just results in ugliness. Little by little, we tend to use Freetype (we have to repeat here how this piece of software is excellent, thanks for it) more and more.

Systray

Some might think it’s kind of gadget, but beyond its own and obvious utility, systray icon stands for “Hey, I don’t eat 500Mb of memory anymore, leave me alone!”

Multiple Text Samples

Among a lot of UI improvements, the ability to maintain a set of samples is what I’d like to emphasize. It saved me a lot of time, I hope it will be the same for you.

Changelog [0.3.1]

From the old Fontmatrix website: the text as it was written, with links to archived copies where the originals are gone. Archived original. All old pages.