Le Monday 17 December 2007 16:52:45 Timothy Boyden, vous avez écrit : > That being said, will Fontmatrix manage the fonts already loaded on the > system, or is it strictly limited to per-user font management?
Hehe, Fontmatrix will do what we need! If it appears clear that a system wide fonts manager is needed, we’ll do it. But keep in mind that such an app is really useful when you have to frequently select fonts set and activate or deactivate it. > 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.p It is quite a classical scheme in which Fontmatrix should find its place. In this case, I’d want three level of management. 1/ System fonts, managed with the distro specific packages manager (apt-get in your case) assure that your apps have needed fonts to display text - here you need wide unicode coverage font but very few families. One with serif, sans and mono variants should be enough in a perfect world. 2/ Agency "base set", decided once and rarely changed. You install it in a dedicated directory of your choice and add it to fontconfig : su, cp and vim are your friends here. Because these fonts are allways activated, Fontmatrix seems useless - at least for me. 3/ User fonts. If each one works alone on a project, Fontmatrix should be used as is. If you need to share tagged sets, I’ll have to write something for that :) > 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). Riku has demonstrated, and coded as well, how to do this without effort. Just filter by tag and "Edit->Activate all" - if you run trunk, you can do that directly in system tray icon by "right-clicking" and select a tag. The way I see that is it’s much more easy to browse through Fontmatrix collection before you start a project to select fonts and tag them compared to do the same in a not dedicated app. Note that direct tag at import has came back in trunk and will be in 0.3 version. > 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. I can, but I won’t do that soon (miss time). As a workaround, you can run fontmatrix as root, select fonts, note their source file and manually copy them in system wide dir. Sorry to not offer more now. > 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. Supporting OTF features, although required in my opinion, is hard to offer in a READ-WRITE environment. I hope Fontmatrix will be an experiencing field for this and work done here could be back at least in Scribus. We’ll see! -- Pierre Marchand http://www.oep-h.com _______________________________________________ Undertype-users mailing list Undertype-users@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/undertype-users
