We’re proud and scared altogether to announce a new public release of Fontmatrix.

This release is numbered 0.6.0. It replaces the Jurassic old 0.4.2. The 0.5.0 branch has been obsoleted as soon as it was branched almost a year ago. Trunk is now numbered 0.6.99.

Compared to 0.4.2, almost everything is new. From the storage backend to the preview engine, all has been reworked to offer a better user experience and prepare exciting future developments. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of changes:

- SQLite database and a Python script to move data from old XML based DB
- Python scripting
- Independent samples directory (allowing easy sharing of this resource)
- Configurable shortcuts
- A text layout engine to display samples (including hyphenation)
- ICU, Harfbuzz and Fontmatrix's own shaper engines
- A playful playground
- PANOSE browser (experimental)
- New help system and user manual written from scratch
- Glyphs comparision panel
- Boolean operators in search filters
- File system browser for fonts
- Themable informations panel (CSS and JavaScript)
- Extract embedded fonts from PDF documents (experimental)
- Find font from an bitmap image (experimental)
- Expose, and possibly export, TrueType tables
- Edit tags
- billions bugs fixed and UI improvements…

You can also read a detailed review of the new version at Libre Graphics World.

DOWNLOAD

Main source for this package is the fontmatrix006 branch on Subversion server:

svn co http://svn.gna.org/svn/undertype/branches/fontmatrix006

You can find source packages in archives on the web server:

Tarball | Md5 | Signature | Key | Win32 build

We don’t provide binary packages for Mac OS X yet and we suggest to Linux users to rely on package repositories for your distributions.

Have fun!