Fontmatrix is a manager built with the kind of features and abilities graphic designers, layout professionals along with others have felt necessary, but modernized with some new touches. The software is targeted at adventurous graphic designers and typesetters who need to manage lots of fonts for their work.
Fontmatrix has a concept of ‘tagging’. This makes it really easy to group fonts and even sub-group them logically for use in a book for instance. The software also has extensive graphical user interface support for showing all glyphs in a font, previews of sample text, variable sizing and also tells what kinds of advanced Open Type features are inside each font. And not least, it creates a nice PDF catalogue of user’s fonts for printing or reference. Fontmatrix is a font manager for professionals, but is intuitive and user friendly.
The software relies on FreeType to render font samples, and on Qt for its graphical user interface.
Key Features
- Attractive user interface which shows all the glyphs in a font, previews sample text, compare fonts, and font information.
- Activating and deactivating your fonts.
- Tagging fonts with sets.
- Finding suitable fonts by constructing simple or complex queries, including using Boolean operators.
- Refining the fonts selection by comparing glyphs in detail.
- Generating font “books” in PDF format.
- Toggle features of OpenType fonts for testing purposes.
- PANOSE browser – the PANOSE system is a method for classifying typefaces solely on their visual characteristics.
- Playful playground.
- Edit tags.
- Python scripting.
- Configurable shortcuts.
Website: github.com/fontmatrix/fontmatrix
Support:
Developer: Pierre Marchand and contributors
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
Fontmatrix is written in C++ and C. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Font Managers | |
|---|---|
| Font Manager | Simple tool suitable for the needs of most desktop users |
| Deepin Font Manager | Manage your fonts |
| Fontmatrix | Featureful personal font manager; keep your font collection in order |
| Pardus Font Manager | Lightweight font management application |
| fnt | apt for fonts |
| FontGet | Install and manage fonts from the command line |
| Fonty Python | Find, view and manage font files of all kinds |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
| Font Renderers | |
|---|---|
| HarfBuzz | OpenType text shaping engine |
| FreeType | Small and efficient software font engine |
| LibICU | Libraries for Unicode and internationalization |
| Fontconfig | Library for configuring and customizing font access |
| FriBidi | Implementation of the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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don’t waste your time will not compile
What you meant to say was *you* were unable to compile the source code. But the source code builds perfectly on my system. And lots of other systems too. Fontmatrix is a really useful piece of software.
KDE has an excellent font management application. But I am amazed that there is not any better font management applications around for DE’s like LXQt or XFCE. Or at least as far as I can see.
If this were available as a package for *buntu systems, I’d try it, but I’m not going to install all the software I need to build it on relatively low powered laptop – espcially as it does not seem to have been updated for six years and would appear to be unmaintained.
If it were a better machine, I’d install Kubuntu, and wouldn’t need it.
The only other applications I am aware of are FontyPython and FontBase. I’m using Fonty Python myself.
Fontmatrix is maintained, it’s last release was November 2017, and there have been many commits since then.
Other good font tools: https://www.linuxlinks.com/FontTools/