Thanks Pierre, After I read through the Font Config documentation, that makes sense. Font Config is basically just an XML database that keeps track of the fonts loaded on the system.
That being said, will Fontmatrix manage the fonts already loaded on the system, or is it strictly limited to per-user font management? My scenario for it's use is this: We are an advertising agency with multiple artists accessing applications like Scribus, Inkscape, and the GIMP using netboot workstations through a Edubuntu LTSP server. For ease of maintenance, all applications and the "base set" of fonts should be managed centrally for all users. Users then can manage their individual preferences for applications and adding temporary fonts as needed. The Artists are used to Mac workstations in which you need to use and activate all the fonts your going to use each time you log in. This means they have to activate their base set of fonts and then, as needed, add temporary fonts on an ad to ad basis. Productivity wise, for the artists it is quicker to have all the available fonts activated as they're designing their ads then it is to search through a font management app, find the font they need then activate it and go back to designing their ad. Dealing with a long font list in the app is not a problem for them (unless of course the app has a font list limit). That's pretty much our use case in a nutshell. After reading my own use case I can see that Fontmatrix would work as you said for the temporary font use. As the system administrator though, it would be nice to have a Fontmatrix type app to manage the overall system font configuration. Maybe that is something you guys can consider. For now I think we'll have to use the PostScript converted version of the OpenType fonts. I so far can't break the artists of their bad habit of using text in their graphics. And Inkscape and the GIMP don't support OpenType fonts either. Hopefully that support will be built-in soon, but I don't know how to push that with their developers. Thanks again, Tim Boyden -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Pierre Marchand Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2007 3:59 PM To: undertype-users@gna.org Subject: Re: [Undertype-users] Thought process for Font Management forFontmatrix Hi Timothy, > Perhaps this should be asked on the Dev list, but I think you guys > monitor this list as well. You're in the right place, there's no special Dev-list. > I was just curious as to how Fontmatrix manages fonts? Does it just > copy fonts to a temp folder for the user and then run fc-cache or does > it use some other functionality to accomplish the same thing? Font management is very simple with Fontmatrix. First there is a dir where all imported fonts are copied ("$HOME/.fonts-reserved). In the same directory, there is the file "fonts.data" which stores tags, tags collections, sample text, etc. Activated fonts are just sym-linked in "$HOME/.fonts-managed" and have the tag "Activated_On" added where all others have "Activated_Off". Basically, it's what I did before by hand. That works, but it will changed into something more sophisticated at some point. I forgot to say, "$HOME/.fonts-managed" is added in a DIR element of your "$HOME/.fonts.conf" file, so all fontconfig aware apps can match against font files in managed directory. > I need to do some more testing, but I tried loading up 768 OpenType > fonts and Fontmatrix hangs up trying to activate them on Ubuntu Gutsy. > Obviously that's a lot of fonts to handle and Extensis Suitcase has > trouble activating that many fonts as well. Yet Linotype's Font > Explorer X has no problems with them. Thanks you for remind me to solve that problem :) It's quite trivial and I hope will be fixed tommorow. It comes from Fontmatrix is mostly intended to fine tune the fonts you make available and it rebuilds the tree list each time you activate a font file without thinking it can be a load of fonts to activate before the user wants to look at the tree. May I ask you why you want to install so much fonts when you have at hand a cool app like Fontmatrix which allow you to activate sets of fonts on demand? half-joke but I'm also curious. > I'm going to try the Postscript version of the fonts with Fontmatrix > again and see if I get better results. I'll need Fontmatrix for > temporarily adding customer supplied fonts when designing ads. It's exactly what is intended for. But don't bother converting your fonts to postscript unless you work with OpenOffice. If you use it with Scribus, just keep in mind 2 things: 1/ Your font will be changed into raw drawing at PDF export (outlined), which is very well for printing but is an issue for displaying at screen (no hinting and other goodies reserved for font rendering in PDF viewers). 2/ Scribus does NOT handle OpenType features. It means that if your font does not provide an old-style "kern" table but a "kern" feature in GPOS table, Freetype will say there's no kerning pairs table and it will lead to some ugliness (if it's for short text or titles, you can tweak with manual tracking). The workaround is to rebuild the font in Fontforge, as an OTF(CFF) but with the "old-style kern table" option, thus you should be ok. > Thanks for your input in advance... Thanks to you. Don't hesitate to ask how it works, to say how you want it to work :-) and to report issues here (no registering needed) https://gna.org/bugs/?func=additem&group=undertype -- Pierre Marchand http://www.oep-h.com _______________________________________________ Undertype-users mailing list Undertype-users@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/undertype-users _______________________________________________ Undertype-users mailing list Undertype-users@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/undertype-users
