Fontmatrix 0.6.0

3 July 2009

We’re proud and scared altogether to announce a new public release of Fontmatrix.

This release is numbered 0.6.0. It replaces the Jurassic old 0.4.2. The 0.5.0 branch has been obsoleted as soon as it was branched almost a year ago. Trunk is now numbered 0.6.99.

Compared to 0.4.2, almost everything is new. From the storage backend to the preview engine, all has been reworked to offer a better user experience and prepare exciting future developments. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of changes:

• SQLite database and a Python script to move data from old XML based DB
• Python scripting
• Independent samples directory (allowing easy sharing of this resource)
• Configurable shortcuts
• A text layout engine to display samples (including hyphenation)
• ICU, Harfbuzz and Fontmatrix’s own shaper engines
• A playful playground
• PANOSE browser (experimental)
• New help system and user manual written from scratch
• Glyphs comparison panel
• Boolean operators in search filters
• File system browser for fonts
• Themable informations panel (CSS and JavaScript)
• Extract embedded fonts from PDF documents (experimental)
• Find font from an bitmap image (experimental)
• Expose, and possibly export, TrueType tables
• Edit tags
• billions bugs fixed and UI improvements…

You can also read a detailed review of the new version at Libre Graphics World.

Download

Main source for this package is the fontmatrix006 branch on Subversion server:

svn co http://svn.gna.org/svn/undertype/branches/fontmatrix006

You can find source packages in archives on the web server:

Tarball | Md5 | Signature | Key | Win32 build

We don’t provide binary packages for Mac OS X yet and we suggest to Linux users to rely on package repositories for your distributions.

Have fun!

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.