A fonts manager? Don't fonts usually manage themselves just fine?
Not when you have 3.000 of them or more. Too many fonts enabled in system at the same time will make any application load considerably longer, switching between them becomes difficult too, and when it comes to choosing which font is right, you just need an application that will sort them by specific characteristics.



So what does it involve — managing fonts?
Tagging them, for instance. You can tag a set of fonts as, e.g., "Fonts for XYZ's annual report brochure" an enable them in the system only when you need them. That way you will see only the fonts you need right now, not all of them at once.

And that's it?
Of course not :) Fontmatrix has sophisticated tools that assist your in a search for a font that be the right choice for a job: from complex queries to using PANOSE metadata and comparing standalone glyphs.



Wait, PANOSE? What on Earth does it mean?
It's a standard that helps to classify fonts through description of their glyphs characteristics? This description is stored inside font files as a kind of metadata (like MP3 tags). Remember those serif buggers? Well, some of them are exaggerated, so they need to be treated separately :) Jokes aside, PANOSE is a great help when you have a really large collection of fonts and you know what kind of a font you need. Filtering all text sans serif fonts with normal weight and medium low contrast takes just 15 seconds in Fontmatrix.

And what if the font designer didn't fill this PANOSE metadata? I still have some untagged MP3 files around from Napster days, if you catch my drift.
Sure, often is the case, and mostly for freeware decorative fonts. This is why you do need Fontmatrix: it has a tool to edit PANOSE metadata. All changes will be saved to Fontmatrix's database, so nothing will be written to actual files.

Is it of any use for a type designer?
Definitely. In the Sample Text tab you can test OpenType features you added to your fonts, and when you're done, creating a PDF fontbook is just few clicks.



OK, just give it to me.
Source code: 0.6.0.tar.gz
Windows build: 0.6.0-win32.exe
Mac OS X build: coming

Developer's main computer is running Linux, so Win/Mac build might be late.

Dear Linux users, we recommend using software repositories for your distributions. If your distribution doesn't ship a recent version of Fontmatrix (which is 0.6.0 as of now), kindly ask them to update it, and if they refuse, make their life a living hell.