Yesterday I had to install a font to make some graphic. I hadn’t done that in a long while so completely forgot how this is done. I found several articles on how to do it. The easiest method comes down to this:
- Go to your home folder
- Enable “Show Hidden Files” option from Nautilus View menu
- Then create new folder with name “.fonts” (with dot in front)
- Now in new folder copy all your true type fonts
- Now restart and new fonts will be in use.
By the way, this is Linux! You don’t have to restart just run`sudo fc-cache -f -v` in a terminal. But you probably already knew that. Easy isn’t it?
I don’t think so. And things like this get even more annoying when under the stress of an upcoming deadline (Aaaargh). It amazed me how many howto’s there are on the web on how to this, but no easy way to just install a font, while designing something that works takes a lot less time than writing all that documentation. Installing a downloaded font should be obvious, I shouldn’t have to search the web in the first place.
So I figured I should design something myself.
I’d like to be able to install a font by just double clicking it in the file manager. What happens now in nautilus is that it launches the gnome font viewer. Which is ok, but it can be better. Currently, it looks something like this:
Click the image to show my comments.
Here is my redesign with an easy way to install the font:
Click to enlarge.
It’s tiny things like this that make me happy when the computer takes work away from me. But when these tiny things are missing they can add up and result in a huge annoyance. Let’s go and make things just work! 
Update: Thomas Wood took my suggestions and implemented it within a day! Just in time for GNOME 2.28. Thanks Thomas!
OMG No way haha. I was just trying out different way to add fonts, especially with otf conversion till I saw your tweet. Thanks for the info! Maybe it would be possible to create a script and put in the the context menu for fonts?
I meant your way of adding a font + the context menu one for e.g. bulk adding.
Jakub: Why not just double click it?
That’s a good point, but I thing the font manager should deal with multiple fonts as well. Haven’t really figured it out yet.
Yeah true. If you select several and open it with the font manager, it could maybe have each line a different font (and a fixed, definable size). Kinda get what I mean?
Just a note, fonts don’t contain “characters” but “glyphs”, also reinstalling an already installed font is desired (a new version etc), so install button need not to be disabled in such case.
Khaled: thanks for that.
Yes, in that case it should be an “Update” button of some sort. I’m not sure if you should have two same fonts with different versions installed. But some people may want to.
I really like it
Hey,
nice to see, that you bring that up. Your solution is quite nice.
Would have been a good issue for the 100 paper cuts project.
Wanted to implement such thing since ages…
Forget the font management for now, just make this install button happen and add a cli gnome-font-install tool to gnome-control-center. This could also make it very easy to add a context menu entry.
-> BGO#581058
Also checkout Mac OS:
http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y222/haalaaluu/open_fontbook.jpg
… and Vista:
http://nathanbowers.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/vista-font-manager.png
Nice work. I assume that it calls the update thing itself after you press ‘Install font’.
I do not think that using sudo, the ‘-f’ flag and the ‘-v’ flag is useful. If you just run ‘fc-cache’ as a regular user it works just as well. (Unless you ran it with sudo before in which case your font cache is owned by root user and you need to change it back or erase it before it will work as intended.)
Note that KFontView already has that option. Also note that KFontView notifies users that applications need to be restarted to pick up a new font.
This looks really nice; hope to use it one day
That being said, isn’t the dialog missing a “close” button? Ot at least some way of handling the situation where I don’t want to install the font anyway.
Søren
Well, I’m missing a close button there, also, the Install button shouldn’t dissapear, just go insensitive. I like the installation in progress feedback, but I’d like to see a better place to put it.
Nice design, thanks for tackling this bit of GNOME who was left aside for a while. Although James Henstridge (http://blogs.gnome.org/jamesh/) has promised to spice it up with someone else at the font-related session at the last UDS (he’s the original author of the viewer and related utilities).
There are a more ideas for your creativity over here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FontManagement
Alongside the installation feature the viewer itself could do with some improvements:
- making the author and license metadata already in the font show up is indeed very useful. Even better there are links we can make clickable: Designer URL, Manufacturer URL, License URL.
See this bugzilla entry
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=407605
- but the description field is still very useful to have.
The tricky bit is going to handle the wrapping of these fields. I’d recommend expanders, some of them folded by default.
Cheers,
Some space for Unicode coverage info would be very very useful too.
ttfcoverage (running on the Debian weekly font review on http://pkg-fonts.alioth.debian.org/review/) gives us “block name: characters/total (percentage)” as follows:
Basic Latin: 97/128 (75.78%)
General Punctuation: 15/112 (13.39%)
Latin Extended-A: 5/128 (3.91%)
Latin Extended-B: 1/208 (0.48%)
Latin-1 Supplement: 104/128 (81.25%)
Letterlike Symbols: 1/80 (1.25%)
Mathematical Operators: 1/256 (0.39%)
Spacing Modifier Letters: 2/80 (2.50%)
Greek and Coptic: 1/144 (0.69%)
HTH.
Awesome, Its bugged me for years thaqt font installation was so stupid in gnome. Looks cool to me. I guess we could also do crazy things with packagekit to see if there’s a package for the font, but just at least having simple installation for the local user would be awesome.
This would be a really great change to the font viewer, but why stop there?
Let’s not simply limit ourselves to adding new fonts, but let’s add features for viewing and managing (removing, renaming?, etc) the current fonts.
Currently it’s a bit of a nightmare, particularly when you have to manage the huge number of combinations of: Oblique, bold, outline, condensed, rounded, proper italic, black, etc. Depending on the version, fonts like Helvetica have approximately 100 different styles, all stored as separate fonts. This can make font selection dialogues completely unusable, but that’s a problem for another day.
You have just fixed another papercut! I’m in love with you
You *used* to be able to just put “fonts://” into the address bar and drag the font file into there to install it, but that was randomly removed for reasons unknown to me.
I really like this redesign, though. Thanks for putting effort into it!
@jakub until we get a better solution here’s a little nautilus script: http://utilities.open-fonts.org/Install_fonts
to be copied to ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts so that it appears in the menu.
It works with multiple fonts and it will create a ~/.fonts if it’s not already there.
Unfortunately, many of the “non-geek” linux distributions have perks like this.
Apparently, it’s easy for the community to just fix it up themselves, but that doesn’t really “just work” when the distro is aimed at the people most ignorant of code.
There needs to be a Wiki OS, “the Operating System that anyone can edit”.
You are right, font installation could be done in a easier way. Teh best solution at the moment is using such a Nautilus Script:
http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Automated+Font+Installer?content=67610
Hi,
there is (was) an easier way to install fonts in gnome just write “fonts://” in the address bar of nautilus and drag and drop the font you want to install (This also gives you a nice overview of all installed fonts). There also was a link under system setting fonts to find this virtual folder.
Unfortunately this feature has been dropped with the transition to GVFS
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/197794
I loved the old system of handling fonts. It was clear and very easy to understand.
Rocks!
Hi,
Your solution is good but only one part of the problem. IMHO by itself this change is still too obscure. We should take a more holistic approach and anticipate the ways a user might attempt to install a font.
1) In Ubuntu, the app you show is called Character Map. I dont think people will quickly come to the realisation that to install fonts they should open Character Map and go from there.
2) Gnome should have a fully fledged font manager that allows the user to browse all installed fonts, view character maps and install new fonts. This app would be the default association with fonts.
3) If people end up in either /usr/share/fonts or ~/.fonts nautilus should have a banner (as it does when in the Trash folder) for installing fonts. Install Fonts… > FileChooser > Nautilus installs font(s).
4) It would be cool if in nautilus certain mime types could optionally offer a contextual ‘popular’ action as a low-profile button when selected. In the case of font mimes nautilus could offer the following http://files.getdropbox.com/u/123544/nautilus-contextual-pop-action.png.
When installed fonts could have a ‘Font Installed’ comment when selected in nautilus.
Err, correction:
Gnome does have a font/charcter browser, in Ubuntu its called Character Map. It seems to focus on character coverage for particular scripts in certain fonts.
How about a case of double clicking an existing font. (I’d say an option to remove or deactivate moght be handy). Nice mockup though.
What is happening in the designers corner…
first nick nearly writes code to fix a bug, and now this.
Looks cool though
Oh wait, you’re still just designing? damn, I want all the designers to be coders.
Your version looks good, but maybe we should just go all the way and change the Gnome Font viewer into something more like FontCase for Mac OS: http://www.bohemiancoding.com/fontcase
WANT.
Heh, I always wondered why this wasn’t possible from the font viewer. Cool!
Looks like the gnome-font-viewer tool is not really supported any more (according to http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=555215). And gnome-specimen is only useful for looking at installed fonts.
So to step aside of these pending problems, maybe an “Install Font” context menu item in Nautilus would be a good way. It could be implemented as separate Nautilus extension and would at least solve this specific problem.
Keep it simple. For those specialized tasks one could copy the files manually. But a simple way to simply install or update a font is certainly needed. Those were one of my biggest gripes with gnome at the beginning (no obvious way to install fonts, no working DVD playback, hard to find and install printer driver, no way to view animated gif files in eog).
Hi Hylke, Hi commenters,
There’s a bug about this in Launchpad that may be a good point to collaborate with upstream. It also includes some links to GNOME bugs.
See https://bugs.launchpad.net/hundredpapercuts/+bug/389657
You shouldn’t have needed to run fc-cache (if you run g-s-d, that is):
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=536185
Or maybe I mix something up a liitle bit… anyway, no restart should be necessary. Also, by running sudo fc-cache you update global fc cache, but you’ve installed your fonts in ~/.fonts, so it doesn’t make any sense.
Thanks for all the great tips
FunkyM:
I agree, font management itself is a different issue itself and I think that more experienced type designers should take a look at that.
Aigars Mahinovs:
> If you just run ‘fc-cache’ as a regular user it works just as well.
I was just being sarcastic, I have no clue what tha command does and I don’t care either.
Søren Hauberg:
> That being said, isn’t the dialog missing a “close” button?
Yes, but you can still close the window.
Alberto Ruiz:
> Install button shouldn’t dissapear, just go insensitive.
I just disagree with that.
yosch: Again, I didn’t want to design a font manager. Just a quick easy way to install a font. Scratching my own itch here
Phillip: That system was good as in less bad. There was still no way how you could find out you should go to fonts:///, you had to search the web for it.
Matthew: That’s an interesting idea.
Nick: Good point!
iain: I can do it, but it will be in C#
oliver: I think that would be a good idea additionally. The context menu is still pretty hidden.
Thanks again! I’ll try to include some of suggestions.
like kjk said, you don’t ever need to run fc-cache on a modern system: gnome-settings-daemon watches the ~/.fonts directory for you and sends a request to pango and font-config to drop the cached values and rebuild them. Behdad demoed this during GUADEC 2009.
as for fonts://: the font viewer was not ported to GVFS; everyone can write a GVFS module to bring it back, but: a) we have gnome-specimen for browsing already installed fonts and b) we really need something like what Hylke sketched up — not an obscure custom URI that can only be discovered if you go on random web forums.
Atleast since version 4 KDE has that install button in its font previewer. When pressed it ask how should it be installed: for current user or system wide. I think it is very simple and clear font viewer functionality.
Just use Fontmatrix, mate
UI-wise it needs some polish, true, but why reinvent the wheel? DrakFont has been managing fonts for Mandriva users for ages: http://doc.mandriva.com/en/2009/Drakxtools-Guide/Drakxtools-Guide.html/drakfont.html
ReinoutS: that’s cool but you still have know about the font managing app. Additionally it would be good to have, but that’s probably what you meant.
Also I have no intention on designing a font managing app.
This is totally unrelated to fonts, but, I would love to see a gtk theme like your mock up.
Vax: I’m working on that
I use fonty python and it’s almost perfect for me.
The only thing I’d love to have is the hability of managing also the font files themselves.
Fontypython+font file management+some UI tweaks would be the perfect tool in my oppinion.
I think there is a major downside of installing fonts copying them into the fonts folder: people gets “trigger happy” and installs thousands of fonts, making it a nightmare to manage them later.
I think the fonty python’s approach of creating groups that can be loaded or unloaded is the best option.
Great post and great re-design of a somewhat clunky interface. Linux needs people like you doing the work you’re doing! Thanks!
(PS - Thanks for following Gnutiken on twitter too!
)
Thanks Jeremiah, I think Gnutiken is a great initiative!
I’m confused. Why is putting something in /.fonts so hard? When I download a font, the archive manager asks me where I want to stick it. So I say, “Archive Manager, my good man, put it in the .fonts directory,” and it is done. And the next time I fire up whatever program, lo, there is the font.