Sunday, October 25, 2015

Help Test New Font Manager Vala/GTK3 Alpha Version

Font Manager is a GTK+ font management application which allows previewing, enabling/disabling fonts and font collections, font installation and removal and more.

The application is not new and you'll find it in the Ubuntu (and Fedora, etc.) repositories but it hasn't been updated in about 4 years. Recently, the Font Manager developer started working on a new GTK3/Vala version and he needs you to test it and post feedback.

Font Manager 0.7 alpha under GNOME Shell

Font Manager 0.7 alpha under Unity

The initial Vala/GTK3 Font Manager version (0.7) is currently considered alpha quality and if you can test it and give feedback, it "would be incredibly useful to determine whether it can move to beta or even a release", as Jerry Casiano, the Font Manager developer, recently told me in an email. So if you want to post feedback, issues, suggestions or whatever regarding the current development (SVN) version, see THIS page.

The following features should work in the latest Font Manager alpha:
  • migration of fonts and collections from the previous version;
  • font previews;
  • enabling / disabling fonts;
  • creating / deleting / enabling / disabling font collections;
  • font installation: by drag and drop or by using the file selector (drag and drop should allow installation of not only individual font files but also entire directories and archives. The file selector unfortunately will not allow selection of directories);
  • font removal;
  • font directory monitoring;
  • adding / removing font folders.

Missing / planned features:
  • help contents;
  • font metadata viewer;
  • character map details viewer;
  • database search;
  • FontConfig editor: session-wide settings, per font settings and aliases;
  • exporting collections.


Install Font Manager alpha


The latest Font Manager 0.7 alpha is available in a daily builds PPA for Ubuntu 14.04 and 14.10 (it can't be built on older Ubuntu versions). To add the PPA and install Font Manager alpha, use the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:font-manager/staging
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install font-manager
Or, if you don't want to add the PPA, simply download the deb from HERE.

If you want to build the latest Font Manager alpha from source, see THIS page.
  
For feedback, issues, suggestions or whatever regarding the current development (SVN) version, see THIS page.
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