Who else?

As promised before I start a series of postings about Libre Graphics Meeting and how it affects development of open source software.

Fontmatrix, as Peter Linnell says, is THE application for Scribus users: it is a new yet versatile font management application. This was the first application in C++ that Pierre Marchand, its principal developer, ever wrote, and it’s amazing how far it’s gone so far.

I don’t think that it would be an exaggeration to call Pierre the next Franz Schmid. Just like Franz studied DTP by reading PDF specifications and created Scribus, Pierre studied OpenType and Unicode reading respective specs and created Fontmatrix. His attitude to variety of scripts is crystal clear: when you go to “Sample text” tab and click “Display options”, you see that the group of controls that defines inline and block progression, is called “World is wide”.

As he states in his unique humorous way, “People ask me about Devanagari support, but I don’t know Devanagari. I read Unicode specs, I fall asleep”

And this is what Pierre says about LGM:

“As you know, Fm is mostly my thing, so i would note at first what it did for myself. LGM has been the place where I’ve met LG people for the first time, from Scribus team to OSP gang and so much other type enthusiasts. It is important to compensate all this time spent alone developing a piece of
software with friendly relationships. It keeps up the motivation to go on. Secondly, Fm was rather unknown at that moment and it has been fantastic (well, it could have been even better with more sleeping time ) to present it to an assembly of type hackers. Time was a bit short to carefully harvest all ideas which have been exposed, but some have found their way in Fm.”

Since then Fontmatrix has undergone a lot of changes in SVN repository. First, version 0.4 was released in June, then the version 0.5 was silently released as an SVN branch, because Pierre didn’t consider it good enough for the public, and the work goes on.

The list of changes since 0.4.2 currently includes extracting fonts from PDF for issue investigation purposes, editing Panose data (changes are stored only in the database), HEX view of TrueType/OpenType tables, new classification (Panose) widget for fonts search which is, again, due to major redesign, new templates system, glyph comparison view (screenshot below), new help system shaping up and more.

But notably the next version will also feature Python scripting which will eventually open the door to all kinds of extensions. For instance, using FontTools.

So if you care about seing Fontmatrix progress further, please consider supporting the conference