Font Installer

[dvh]

It would be great to use Specimen not only to view fonts, but also to install new ones in ~/.fonts or /usr/share/fonts, and then update the font cache afterwards.
Bonus points for the ability to download already purchased fonts from commercial type foundries, like Bitstream's MyFonts.

[wouter bolsterlee (wbolster)]

Yes, I agree that would be useful. HOWEVER, Gnome Specimen can only show fonts that can be retrieved using GTK+/Pango/Fontconfig, which implies the font should already be installed (and "configured" in fontconfig, i.e. put in the a directory that is in the search path). While fontconfig cannot be configured dynamically (it uses XML configuration files) and Freetype cannot be directly invoked from Python I see no possibility to have this feature...

[dvh (packetbell)]

Why would Specimen need to invoke Freetype? Can't it just copy the font that a user wants to install into ~/.fonts (or sudo prompt and copy to /usr/share/fonts) and then run fc-cache? It could even run a bash script to do that, right?

[wouter bolsterlee (wbolster)]

Yeah, but usually you would want to preview the font first...

[dvh (packetbell)]

Fonts can be previewed with Nautilus and Gnome Font Viewer before they're installed, but there is (AFAIK) no easy way to install fonts from Gnome. Specimen would fill a void if it could do that.

[stopsatgreen (p-gasston)]

I second this request. Gnome already has plenty of font viewers, but needs a font installer/manager.

Fonty Python (https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/fontypython) is good, but needs development.

[tutuca (tutuca)]

I was just thinking about this feature and I would like to extend the brainstorming a little bit further.
It would be useful to have some sort of Font Library (a custom user-defined folder with lots of fonts or folder containing fonts) and list all available fonts in it. Select some, preview them, and symlink the ones you want to install into the ~/.fonts directory.

For the previewing problem, can't we take borrowed some code from gnome-font-viewer or fontypython?

PD: just for you to know, at work we use bitstream's font navigator under windows and agter playing with lots of utilities it was the one i feel more comfortable with.