Fonts

App for managing the user's fonts.

Goals

Use cases and personas

• Amateurs who are using a small selection of fonts for their own documents and projects. Font usage is transient and user engagement with fonts is low.
• Professionals who use a lot of fonts, and may have a pre-existing font collection.

Primary goals

• Live update to reflect changes in the user's font directory
• Include system and user-installed fonts (system fonts should be indicated), but only install per-user
• Search installed fonts
• Browse installed fonts, potentially by:
  • Style
  • Weight / number of weights
  • Coverage
  • Author
• View installed fonts:
  • Specimens
  • Metadata: descriptions, authors, links, etc
• Remove installed fonts
• Install/import fonts (from files or directories)
• Export fonts (likely to an archive file)

Secondary goals

• Enter your own specimen text (for both the overview and individual font view)
• Enable/disable fonts
• Star favourites (ideally this would be visible in apps that use fonts)
• Detect issues with fonts: validate them, detect duplicates
• Allow the user to show their fonts in a dedicated directory in home

Potential future directions

• Install from a link
• Browse/search an online repository from the app
• Update installed fonts

Non-goals

• Not for installing fonts system-wide
• Not for installing UI fonts
• Not for installing/updating language support

Relevant Art

GNOME

Font Manager

New designs by Tobias: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/app-mockups/-/blob/master/font-manager/font-manager.png

Font Book

Font manager for Mac:

• Shows fonts for both the current user and the system. User fonts are stored in the fonts library (~/Library/Fonts)

• Install fonts from a file
• Detects duplicate/invalid fonts and alerts the user
• Allows downloading fonts
• Allows printing a font

Windows 10

There's no dedicated font app. Instead:

• You can install fonts directly from the Microsoft Store
• You can open a fonts directory from explorer and add/remove font files there

TypeFace2

TypeFace2 - seems to concentrate on tagging and organisation; no sign of a download/install feature

Fontbase

Google Fonts

See Google Fonts.

Features:

• Display
  • Enter your own sample text
  • Change font size
• Filter by:
  • Category
  • Language
  • Number of styles
  • Thickness
  • Slant
  • Width
• Sort by
  • Trending
  • Most popular
  • Newest
  • Name

Seems to just spit out .zip files when you choose to download a font.

FontFinder

Google Fonts client for GNOME. Allows sorting by popularity, trending, date added, alphabetical.

Discussion

If the fonts app is going to manage the contents of a directory, we'll encounter interesting questions about the ownership and organisation of that directory. Do we allow users to manually rearrange the directory? If so, how should the app react to those changes? How do we handle situations where what the app wants to do conflicts with what the user has done?

Tentative Design

See Also