On Wed, Sep 26, 2018 at 1:23 PM Jan Claeys <
lists@janc.be> wrote:
On Tue, 2018-09-25 at 20:48 +0530, shirish शिरीष wrote:
> Is there any other tool besides font-manager to view fonts ?
>
> I tried font-manager but the application seems not to work well in
> debian-mate
>
> Is there any other font-viewer that I could look at ?
It kind of depends on what is meant by "view fonts". If you mean a font-manager–style application where you can browse a font collection, there is not really anything comparable that is free software at the moment. You can, however, use a few proprietary tools like Fontbase that provide Linux versions (I mean, it's just an Electron app, but it runs fine on a modern distro). I think there are a few web-based ones as well, which let you open a local directory, and some JS scans the font files for you. Not sure how much info they scrape and send back to advertisers, however.
If you just want to inspect a particular font (say, to examine its coverage, appearance, or capabilities), there are also not a lot of choices, but they are different. You'll find utilities in FreeType and HarfBuzz (like hb-view, where you can see HarfBuzz output for a Unicode input string) and the aforementioned gwaterfall. There's a 'fontview' utility from Google i18n on GitHub, but it's really hard to build (and it actually needs help IMO; it would be good to get the build process cleaned up, so it could be packaged).
But here again, you'll have just as much luck finding web-based options (including free ones) like
wakamaifondue.com since the browsers all support drag-n-drop of font binaries.
Looking a ways further out, the GTK+ developers are adding more font-inspection capabilities to the built-in font selector widget, which I'm hopeful will result in less of a need for dedicated font-manager apps for many people. Some of that was in the 3.24 release a few weeks ago. Similarly, I'm cheerleading for some changes to AppStream that might let the system package manager provide a little more functionality, too. But it's hard to predict when (or if) that sort of work will stabilize.
Nate