GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 355691
Font Management System for GNOME
Last modified: 2009-01-16 00:57:50 UTC
As per the discussion held on the GNOME mailing list here: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2006-March/msg00203.html quite a few people are seeing a need for improved font management on GNOME, probably via the creation of a new applet. If gfontview is unmaintained, then that adds to the need to build a new module, particularly one that is at least feature-comparable to Suitcase. Font previewing, easy installation and removal, tight intergration with GNOME Office and Open Office, pre-flight and workflow integration of fonts into documents and the ability to easily transfer fonts between desktop machines, either electronically or via porting to media such as CDs and synching these would also need to be included, as well as data about each font such as licenses and rights, font classification and substitutional abilities and so forth.
*** Bug 347189 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
From: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/gnome-applets/+bug/66833 Gnome lacks a tool to manage fonts the way you can in KDE or in OS X. It is very hard to work with a large number of fonts if you cannot enable or disable them when needed. For instance I have just had to uninstall a load of novelty fonts because they were bloating the Abiword font menu to an unmanageable size. What you should be able to do is to enable or disable fonts both as root (for all users) and as an ordinary user. You should be able to do this both for individual fonts and for user-defined categories. I have just tried going to fonts:/// in Nautilus, but it doesn't offer any obvious ways to do anything. For instance I tried dragging and dropping a font file into the window, but it didn't stick, not even when I did it is root. What one needs to be able to do is to enable or disable whole groups of fonts at a time. You also need to be able to work out how to do this without anyone telling you. I would have expected to find a font manager in the System-->Preferences menu on the Gnome top bar. It is not reasonable to expect a novice to do Go-->Location... "fonts:///" without reading a manual.
I think users shouldn't be able to disable fonts, and I also think that it wouldn't help solve the problems involved (e.g. you might want to keep fonts for a full set of scripts available for your web browser, while you don't want to see all those foreign fonts in a word processor or DTP program). I have never seen the KDE font dialogs, but I would propose something like this: - a font manager that allows the user to group fonts under a unique "font-group" name - the gtk/gnome font selection dialog should grow a font-group selector - there should be a default font group (distributions might pre-fill this group with basic fonts for the user-chosen locale or whatever) that is shown by default - applications should be able to query font-groups, e.g. to populate font-selection widgets - applications should be able to create font-groups (maybe even temporary ones?) - of course there should be a meta-group that shows all installed fonts - it might be useful to have other meta-groups (e.g. "all fonts that include cyrillic script") BTW: font-group-aware programs could create/use font-groups specific to certain projects etc. (Think about creating several documents based on a house-style.)
there is an application for font management: gnome-specimen see: http://uwstopia.nl/blog/2008/06/gnome-specimen-now-in-gnome-svn you're quite better off asking for features to be implemented by that application. apparently, the author is not using bugzilla, but I guess he's going to reply to an email.
GNOME Specimen is not an application for font management?