Idea
#303: Font Repository with a User-Friendly GUI
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1298
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Written by doughy the 29 Feb 08 at 00:25.
Category: Others.
Related to:
Nothing/Others.
Status: New
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Description
Ubuntu should include a way to add/remove fonts from a repository just like the add/remove program panel. When a user needs a new font, they could open up the window, and the program would download the latest repository fonts. The user could look through the fonts and choose which ones to install by simply checking a box and clicking "apply." A user could search for font keywords to find certain styles of fonts. For example, someone could search for keywords words "serif","sans serif","cursive", and the GUI would display fonts that match the search. This would be a killer tool for designers.
Furthermore, the GUI could be very helpful. When a user browses a font, a sample image of it could be automatically loaded so that the user can quickly find fonts that are appealing to them. A rating system or popularity gauge could be used so that the best fonts can be highlighted.
A tool like this would create inscentive for font designers to make their designs free/public. Credits could be given to designers in the font descriptions.
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Comments
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doughy wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 00:48
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Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that a tool like this would also clean up the process of installing fonts. Right now it's pretty clumsy to first download a font, unpack it, and then place it in the obscure system directories. This would be both powerful for the pros and easy enough to excite non-technical users.
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derick.eisenhardt wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 06:48
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If you go to System>Preferences>Appearance>Fonts, there is a teeny tiny button that says "Details..." this will bring up another screen, and if you click the button at the bottom that says: "Go to Fonts Folder" Nautilus will pop up and show you all your currently installed fonts with a graphical preview such as you described. However, not only is this a pain in the ass to dig through to get to, but there is no way to install fonts from this screen. It should be just as easy for someone to install a new font as it is for you to drag and drop a downloaded Metacity or GTK theme.
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roryok wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 09:34
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An integrated font manager would be nice with this, which lets you have a font archive. You may have 10000+ fonts downloaded, but you don't want them all installed at once.
A little manager app that lets you pick a selection or set of fonts to "check in" or "check out" of the fonts folder.
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samnes wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 10:24
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I definitely agree with comments. I just found out that there is a program called fonty python that allows one create font sets as roryok suggested but I would prefer more integrated solution as the program was really hard to discover and tricky to install.
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openstandards wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 12:17
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This would be a nice feature to have and I can see many other distros using something like this for their own projects and besides makes the new release history look tasty and just shows how much the desktop is being thought about.
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deejross wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 14:04
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This would also be good for removing 100 or so fonts that you would never use that are installed by default.
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Lee wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 20:22
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Agreed. But this should be a front-end for apt packages, not a seperate solution.
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rawsausage wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 22:34
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It's not like if there were more than 5 good free fonts available anyways.
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cardinals_fan wrote on the 1 Mar 08 at 01:30
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YES! I am not a big fan of using a GUI for a CLI's work, but this would be a really nice addition to Ubuntu.
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ShadowVlican wrote on the 1 Mar 08 at 05:23
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if this is included with ubuntu, that would put it AHEAD of windows!! (well.. on this front anyways...)
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atomicron wrote on the 1 Mar 08 at 05:36
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I like this idea.
Perhaps out of scope, but I have always found that I lose user-installed fonts when upgrading (re-installing) Ubuntu and other OSes. I would appreciate the ability to have a list of fonts I like on my system saved to the cloud somewhere so that I can simply "download preferred fonts" in future Ubuntu installs.
Alternatively this could be achieved by the Ubuntu installer detecting and preserving installed fonts on the system - and keeping the cloud out of it.
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orionjoda wrote on the 1 Mar 08 at 11:23
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Great idea. It's such a pain in the ass to install new fonts, and I do it pretty often.
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yok-sudo wrote on the 1 Mar 08 at 11:29
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Good fonts come from FontFont, Linotype, Adobe, Eric Spiekermann and others and are not OpenSource. Everyone who work as a Graphic Artist don't care about (the most) OpenSource fonts. So it's important to have a local repository in /home/$user/Fonts (addition to the deb-repository). The Application should read this Directory and allow me to install fonts system-wide if I have admin-privilegs.
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LostOverThere wrote on the 2 Mar 08 at 10:34
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Great Idea! This would make it so much easier to install those obscure Windows fonts your school/work forces you to use.
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ka2 wrote on the 6 Mar 08 at 07:19
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derick.eisenhardt: you copy and paste them.
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filipf wrote on the 8 Mar 08 at 07:27
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I agree. We should also have a program that lets you easily go through the fonts installed in the system and preview them using a selected phrase (other than the "Quick brow fox"). This would be helpful for examining fonts for certain unicode characters.
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zarlino wrote on the 11 Mar 08 at 16:23
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This is a brilliant idea
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shovelhead wrote on the 12 Mar 08 at 22:53
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Yeah. I have - for a reason that I do not really understand about - 40 AeArabiaXYZ fonts on my Notebook - and I don't need them.
I would LOVE a GUI fontmanager to make installation/uninstallation easyer.
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Crandom wrote on the 22 Mar 08 at 23:12
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This is almost a necessity, especially with wine. I was guessing on Bridge Base Online for 2 weeks until I finally discovered a location called fonts:/// to paste the ones I needed.
An easy way to install fonts and a massive apt-like font repository is a step in the right direction. Makes websites like http://www.dafont.com/ defunct.
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hunt.topher wrote on the 7 May 08 at 17:07
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I don't like the huge number of fonts currently packaged with OpenOffice etc. I think it would be great to be able to easily peel those down to, say, 10-15 commonly used fonts through a GUI.
Where would you put the GUI for this? The "Preferences" list is getting kind of crowded.
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Post your comment
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Blueprint :
Ubuntuforums.org thread #580301
