Fontmatrix - a Great Font Viewer and Catalog App for Linux

One of the things I noticed when I moved from the Mac OSX and Windows world to LInux is that dealing with fonts is a bit different. Not necessarily harder, but... different. For one, installing fonts was a bit more cumbersome, at least back then. Things have changed now, but before to install a font involved taking the font, finding the right directory, then creating a folder for it, refreshing your font configuration files, and then either restarting, logging out and back in, or making sure all your programs (such as word processors), were restarted, before the fonts would show up.

Now, installing a font is as simple as double clicking and installing, which is nice.

But another area where I believe Mac OSX in particular had an edge is in font management. Apple introduced a program called Font Book, and there have been other nice cataloging applications before, and this was always something I'd missed for Linux.

Well, I'm missing it no more, because of a nice program called Fontmatrix

Fontmatrix is a Linux program designed to allow Linux users to view, browse, categorize, preview and print out lists of fonts, as well as test them out.

After you have installed Fontmatrix, simply start it up and you'll be shown a window broken down into three or four panes. You'll see each font listed, along with all the sub-fonts (such as bold, italic, regular, thin, etc.), each font includes, along with a preview list, so you can see each font in use. There's also another pane which shows font information, samples, the individual glyphs (characters such as letters and symbols), and more.

There's even a "playground" area where you can play around with fonts, testing out how they look at any particular size, and then dragging around individual letters. To be honest, I'm not sure what the purpose in that is (the dragging around of letters; see the screen shots for an example), but I have to admit it was fun to play around with!

Fontmatrix also gives the option to print out a list of fonts. This would be a great feature for someone doing graphic design. Having a hard copy printout would allow the designer to take the list of fonts to potential clients as a sample of what design elements could be used.

But the real value in Fontmatrix is that it allows the user to activate and deactivate fonts. Why would someone want to do this? Well, think of that poor graphic artist who went out and purchased an Adobe font catalog, or one of those CDs that offers hundreds of fonts. Chances are you'll never use a large percentage of them, but you don't want to take them off your hard drive. Fontmatrix makes it simple to select a font and say, "I don't want to see you anymore," when it comes time to select a font to use. It will simply not appear in your system's font picker.

Fontmatrix is a good program. It's a bit on the cluttered side (having everything in a single window is nice, but for some of the features I think a pop-up window would have been useful as well), but works well. You can take a look at it on the Fontmatrix website, and download and use it for free.