GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 555215
Please resuscitate gnome-font-viewer
Last modified: 2009-09-06 19:26:18 UTC
Hi, It looks like gnome-font-viewer was killed during the 2.24 development. But to my knowledge, there's no equivalent application in GNOME. gnome-specimen could probably do a better job, but it can't yet as it requires the font file to be installed. Where with gnome-font-viewer you only have to click on a font file in order to visualize it, with gnome-specimen, you have to: - install the font in the right folder (and that's not an obvious thing to do). - find the font you've just installed among all the other installed fonts, probably with a name that has nothing in common with the font file name. - remove the file from the font folder if you don't want to keep it installed. Emmanuel.
uws: are their plans to provide install functionality for specimen?
Plans: plenty. Time: none. (And knowledge: not enough)...
Also see bug #407605. In short, we're not terribly interested in adding the font viewer back to the control center (it didn't make a lot of sense before, it doesn't now). Asking the gnome-utils maintainer might be an option, though, if someone volunteers to do the work. Moving there for feedback.
there already is gnome-specimen, a font viewer for the GNOME desktop. I doubt relocating it into gnome-utils would buy us anything - and I most certainly won't get a font viewer inside gnome-utils unless it's properly maintained.
I spoke with Rodrigo, who originally committed the change to delete the font-viewer, which he did while deleting the vfs-methods from g-c-c. We agreed that dropping the fontilus and themus vfs methods made sense, since they no longer work, but the font viewer and thumbnailer (whch were in the same dir) really should have stayed, since they currently have no replacement. (GNOME Specimen could be a replacement, but it currently lacks the functionality, and is not part of Desktop). This is a pretty annoying regression for 2.24 (and occurred very late in the 2.24 cycle), so the plan Rodrigo and I came up with was to bring back the viewer and the thumbnailer for at least 2.24 and then look at addressing the problem properly. I agree that gnome-control-center is not really a sensible place for the binaries, nor is gnome-utils, but g-c-c has the advantage of at least being able to recover the translations, etc. easily. FWIW, I have recovered the viewer and thumbnailer in trunk, under a different directory. I am going to attempt to recover the po strings and then request approval to backport the change to gnome-2-24 to plug the regression. After that people can work out what the correct course of action should be. Incidently, this is one of the things that jhbuilding doesn't pick up. The binary goes away, but an older binary is still installed on your system, so things keep working as they always have been.
Maybe it should be placed in nautilus-actions for when the user open the popup menu on a TTF font file.
OK, according to bug #325516, maybe it's not a good idea. What about a nautilus plugin then?
Nice going GNOME. You killed a great feature. This was very important to many designers. You can find fontilus (gnome-font-viewer) here: http://www.jamesh.id.au/software/fontilus/ I managed to compile it, and it works, but the thumbnail generator doesn't. I guess it's because of the lack of vfs integration.
(In reply to comment #5) > (GNOME Specimen could be a replacement, but it currently lacks the > functionality, and is not part of Desktop). what functionality is missing, and have bugs been filed against gnome-specimen in order for the maintainer to address them? as I said: unless I get somebody to maintain it, or co-maintain it, I cannot accept another component in gnome-utils.
(In reply to comment #9) > (In reply to comment #5) > > > (GNOME Specimen could be a replacement, but it currently lacks the > > functionality, and is not part of Desktop). > > what functionality is missing, and have bugs been filed against gnome-specimen > in order for the maintainer to address them? > > as I said: unless I get somebody to maintain it, or co-maintain it, I cannot > accept another component in gnome-utils. > I did think the two applications covered slightly different use cases. I used gnome-specimen when I wanted to look at the installed fonts on my system. But if I have a folder of fonts where I want to retrieve a particular font or where I want to see what does it contain, I have now two possibilities: * install KDE basic applications and use KDE font viewer to look at non-installed fonts * put every font I want to look at in my ~/.fonts folder, remembering the names of the fonts, look at them using gnome-specimen, then remove the fonts I do not want to keep. This is particularly inefficient when I have a large number of fonts or when file names do not correspond to font names. At the moment, I have to keep KDE core installed on my system just to look at the fonts I did not install - that's a serious loss of functionality on Gnome. I'll try to fill a bug against gnome-specimen.
I just looked at gnome-specimen bugs on Launchpad, and I found out g-s and g-f-w really had different use cases. Here's uws' answer about a similar feature: «Yes, I agree that would be useful. HOWEVER, Gnome Specimen can only show fonts that can be retrieved using GTK+/Pango/Fontconfig, which implies the font should already be installed (and "configured" in fontconfig, i.e. put in the a directory that is in the search path). While fontconfig cannot be configured dynamically (it uses XML configuration files) and Freetype cannot be directly invoked from Python I see no possibility to have this feature...» So, if I want to look a font not configured under fontconfig, the only possibility I have is to install KDE, as there are no more GTK/Gnome applications covering my use case.
It is quite an annoying issue. I think at least the thumbnailer should be put back in. Why has it been removed in the first place? Maintenance issues?
The thumbnailer has already been put back in place in gnome-control-center trunk (see gnome-control-center/font-viewer/).
Could this also be put back into the gnome-2-24 branch, so that current distros would pick it up whenever the next 2.24 gnome-control-center is released?
Please put this back.
I'm sure the maintainers are quite busy, so would be glad to help out with the backporting in some way, if that'll expedite getting this back into the gnome-2-24 branch.
I miss gnome-font-viewer too!
Anybody: Please stop "Me too" comments spamming my inbox. Thanks.
Andre: is there anything non-maintainers can do to help backport this to gnome-2-24? I'd be glad to help, but it seems like this bug's moved past triaging, and I'm unclear on what else could be done.
Very basic function lost :( Now I have to install fonts first to know whether I need these fonts. A bit annoying. Hope we can get the gnome-font-viewer back.
gnome-specimen is a great application, but it does not allow me to preview font before installing them. Also the old font thumbnailer was ideal when browsing large collections of fonts (which often have unclear filenames). Just seeing those first two thumbnailed letters helped a lot in finding the right fonts. Please bring fontilus back.
Does anyone know what this bug's status is? While I don't like adding noise to the devs' inboxes, as an outsider there's no way to tell whether backporting this to the gnome-2-24 branch has been considered and rejected, or whether this has fallen through the cracks. Its status is still UNCONFIRMED, so that's no help. Any info?
The current status is that it will likely come back in 2.26, but noone's done any work to make it available in 2.24.
I think it's already present in 2.26...
Should be fixed for 2.28: http://blogs.gnome.org/thos/2009/07/26/re-adding-fonts-in-gnome/