Understanding and using Fontmatrix
Intro
In the main view, each font is drawn with its own typeface.
You can customize the text to be drawn in this view for every
font face. Custom text can include Unicode symbols.
You can preview typefaces of installed fonts listed in the
Windows Fonts view, typefaces of fonts listed in the List
view, or you can select any folder in the Folders view preview
all typefaces located in the selected folder.
User Interface
Main window is divided in two major parts. On the left side there are Font listing
and Preview tabs, while right hand side displays various info about each font, logically
separated into Info, Sample Text, Glyphs and Tags
tabs.
Browsing The Font List
Navigating through the list is simplified by multiple levels of depth:
Fonts are sorted by
the first letter of font typeface, full typeface name and the deepest level — the variant. On the last two levels
fonts can be activated. Enabling typefaces is done by clicking on the checkbox in front of the name. You can
selectively enable just singular variants at the lowest level.
The chosen font is automatically synchronized
with the preview tab, framing the preview in the opposite direction. You can use Ctrl+Space to switch between the
tabs on the top.
There are additional helpers below: 'View all' and 'View activated' which are pretty self
explanatory.
When you finally get familiar with your collection of fonts you can use the search mechanism to narrow a selection
of fonts. Searching is optionally case sensitive.
The main reason this program is called a font manager is its
most powerful features are tagging fonts and organizing tags into collections for specific use. More info on that is
to come later.
Displaying Fonts
Fontmatrix offers you detailed information about your fonts. There are three types of information
this font manager can provide:
- Font Info Tab — The font info shows the the internal text fields which display copyright
information, number of glyphs, character map coverage, the Postscript name, which may be different to the
displayed name in some applications and sometimes a version string. On occassion, there will be descriptive
text and other information.
- Sample Text Tab By default this panel shows a sample of text and numbers from basic Latin-1,
but you can add your own Unicode text samples in a number of languages and scripts to display the most important
glyphs contained in a font. For example you can add a snippet of Arabic for use with fonts containing Arabic
glyphs or add other non-Latin text for non-Latin fonts. Even most non-Latin fonts do have a basic range of
Latin glyphs, even if the font is not used primarily for Latin texts.
When you open an Open Type Font,
below there will be an additional panel which displays the advanced Open Type features available within the
font. With Absolute Mode Fontmatrix uses the basic Qt library to display the glyphs. When it
renders onto the screen, Qt does not know that’s a glyph and does not optimize the rendering. It’s the reason
why its display is not optimal at a small size. Quality and precision increases with larger sizes. With
Freetype View is the well-known glyph rendering specialist. So we ask Freetype
to rasterize a path or otherwise create a bitmap (with antialiasing) and get the result in a simple bitmap
display. Thus the display has good quality even at small size (try a 4/5 pt to get the actual idea of the
Freetype team's skill! It’s amazing). But as it is a raster, quality will decrease when you zoom in.
- Glyph FIXME