Fontmatrix 1.0.0

25 September 2026

Fontmatrix 1.0.0 finishes the move to Qt 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 and adds support for modern font technologies. Download it.

Highlights

• Variable fonts. A new Variations panel lets you pick a named instance or move each axis with a slider. The glyph chart, Playground, Compare and the font book all use the chosen coordinates, and Fontmatrix remembers them between sessions. The family list can show one row per named instance.
• Colour fonts. CBDT and sbix bitmaps (such as Noto Color Emoji), COLR v0, COLR v1 and OpenType-SVG glyphs render in colour. Before, they showed as grey shapes or red boxes.
• Right-to-left text. Arabic, Hebrew and other right-to-left scripts are laid out in their own direction, with the Unicode bidirectional algorithm and mirrored glyphs.
• Font activation on every platform. On Linux, activated fonts go to ~/.local/share/fonts/fontmatrix and Fontmatrix no longer edits your fonts.conf; an optional helper activates fonts for all users. On Windows, activation works for the first time, without administrator rights.
• New filters by language coverage, licence and font technology.
• Duplicate finder (Tools → Duplicates): identical files, and fonts with the same family, style and version, shown in groups.

Also new

• Export font list as XeTeX in the Tools menu.
• Samples are hyphenated in their own language with the system’s libhyphen.
• The handbook opens in a window of its own where KDE Help Center is missing.
• Remote directories are back.
• The Bulgarian translation is complete. Human translators for other languages are wanted.

Removed

The PythonQt scripting engine, the QtWebEngine help browser, the embedded copies of HarfBuzz and libhyphen (the system libraries are used now), and the ICU, m17n and Pango shapers.

The full release notes list every change, including the bug fixes and the packaging work.