Hi all,

I've been working on a little tool for the past couple of days, which I'm calling the "Zen Fonts Manager."  This tool is a simple way to add and remove fonts from your system, and lets you preview the fonts you've currently got installed.  This program detects whether you're adding a bitmapped font or a TrueType font and places the font file either into /usr/share/fonts/misc/ or /usr/share/fonts/TTF/, respectively.  After you install or remove a font, it updates the system font caches, so your new fonts are immediately available and your old fonts are immediately gone.

It's also international!  There are translations for Dutch, Greek, and French, in addition to the default of English.

Note:  to have the add/remove buttons work, run this through ktsuss.


INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS:

Go to http://rs.tc/dl/zw/  and download the tclkit.gz and zfm files.  Then:

gzip -d tclkit.gz
chmod +x tclkit && mv tclkit /usr/local/bin
chmod +x zfm

Then, just run:  ./zfm


This is definitely a work-in-progress.  Please let me know if you like it, and please send feedback and suggestions for improvement!  I've tested it out plenty, adding and removing fonts, and a few other people have already tested it on their systems without problem.

Also note that when you remove a font, this program does in fact delete it from the disk!


And last, see the french announcement here!  http://support.zenwalk.org/index.php?topic=12077.0



thanks!
hat0

hi

i like the program. it works well here.  just a few comments:

1. the size of the window changes depending on the size of a font set under view. this is rather annoying.

2. the default font used for the program is rather ugly.

3. i think it's better to have a "close" button.

4. maybe better to have an option to relocate "removed" fonts somewhere.

5. how can i change the language option from english to french?



thanks for the program. it is very nice.

nice project. i don't like that-tcl look. maybe you could do the same with gtk-dialog. it looks much better i think.

or maybe pygtk  (i can help you with this)
anyway cool idea ...i need this!

Hi all,

I've made an updated version of the panel!  It's got a nicer visual theme and includes several more language translations:

Dutch, English, French, Greek, Japanese


If you've already downloaded tclkit + zfm, you'll have to download those both again.


Thanks!
hat0

Could you maybe do a package for it?

Tsuren,

The program reads your system language setting (environment variable LANG), so if you want to try out the french, that's the place to adjust it.  On your GUI feedback, I agree about the resizing window and am going to swap that out.  I'm also thinking of a way to cleanly stash removed fonts elsewhere (maybe stick them in the XFCE trash can?), and will work to incorporate such feedback into the next prerelease.  Thanks for your feedback.


DodoFXP,

I would like to make a package, and after I work on incorporating a few more little changes and tweaks, I'll go ahead and do that.  Thank you for your feedback as well.


hat0

Please make a package for [extra].
We may include tcl/tk in the ISO in the future, so ...

++

Hi Fredg,

Will do!  My apologies for not getting back to this sooner--various real-life things have been disruptive, as is always the case when there's a fun project to do.  I will try to have the updates in place and create a package by the end of the weekend.

Thanks for your interest!


hat0

G'day,

Just wanted to add my thanks for a very handy program

BJA

I havent tried your script yet, but looking at your description I see that my solution is quite different.
First of all, my font-collection is quite large (31767 items, totalling 1.1 GB) and have been put together over a number of years...having all these installed at once is not practical on any computer no matter the amount of RAM, so my strategy is to activate/deactivate them when needed. To do this I have created two very simple nautilus-scripts (std bash, not really dependent on nautilus): 'create samplesheet', and 'togglefont'.
'Create samplesheet' creates thumbnails and a basic html-file for displaying them (thumbnails are cached for speed), and 'togglefont' checks to see if the selected font-file(s) is already active, deactivates if it is, and activates if not...(messy senctence, hope you got that).
The activated fonts are simply symlinked into "~/.fonts", and deactivating is as easy as removing the symlink.
So, my collection stays sorted and untouched, and no extra disk-space is wasted.

It have to be said though, that my scripts are very simple, but they get their job done.

I personally believe this strategy to be better, at least for those of us with larger collections...just my two cents