Font Management

Craig Drummond

Revision Plasma 5.20 (2021-04-09)

Font Management

This module is responsible for installing, un-installing, previewing and managing your fonts.

Font Groups

There are 4 special pre-defined font groups:

  1. All Fonts This will display all fonts, both personal and system-wide.

  2. Personal Fonts The fonts shown will be your personal fonts, and will not be available to other users.

  3. System Fonts The fonts shown will be those available to all users. Installing a font system-wide, or removing a system-wide font, will require administrator privileges.

  4. Unclassified This will list all fonts that have not been placed into any user-defined groups. This group will only appear if you have some user-defined groups.

To add a font to a group, drag it from the list of fonts onto a group. To remove a font from a group, drag the font onto the All Fonts group.

Below this list you find buttons to create a new group, remove a group and enable or disable the fonts in the current group.

In the context menu of this list you have additional menuitems to print font samples and export a font to a zip archive.

Enabling and Disabling

Users with many fonts may find it useful to only have certain fonts enabled (or active) at certain times. To facilitate this, this module will allow you to disable individual fonts, or whole groups of fonts. Disabling a font does not remove the font from the system, it simply hides it so that it no longer appears within applications. Re-enabling a font will then allow it to be used.

Font List

The main display is a list of the installed fonts, grouped via the fonts' family name - the number in square brackets represents the number of installed styles for that family. e.g. the Times font may be listed as:

  • Times [4]

    • Regular

    • Italic

    • Bold

    • Bold Italic

To install a font, press the Install from File... button, and select the desired fonts from within the file dialog. The selected font group will control where the fonts will be installed.

To un-install fonts, select the appropriate fonts from the list, and press the button.

Click with the right mouse button to open a context menu with some additional actions like Enable, Disable, Print, Open in Font Viewer and Reload.

Font Filtering

A text field on top of the font preview allows you to filter the list of fonts. You can filter fonts based upon different categories:

  1. Family.

  2. Style.

  3. Foundry.

  4. FontConfig match. This allows you to enter a family name, and see the family that fontconfig would actually use.

  5. Font file type.

  6. Font file name.

  7. Font file location.

  8. Writing system.

Get New Fonts

New fonts may be installed from local files, or downloaded using Get Hot New Stuff. The Get New Fonts... entry in the tool button (located above the group list), allows you to install fonts from the Internet. The fonts downloaded in this manner will be installed into your Personal Fonts group. To install system-wide, you will need to move them to the System Fonts group - this may be achieved by dragging the fonts over the System Fonts group entry and will require administrator privileges.

Duplicate Fonts

If you have lots of fonts installed on your system it is possible that you may have duplicates.

Click on the Find Duplicates... button to open a simple tool that will scan your system looking for fonts that have multiple files associated with them. For example, if you have times.ttf and times.TTF installed in /usr/local/share/fonts the underlying font mechanism (called FontConfig) will only see one of these. So, if you un-installed the font, it would re-appear, as only one of the files would have been removed. Running this tool will produce a dialog listing each font that has multiple files, and the corresponding list of files. To select a file for deletion, click on the column containing the trash can icon.

Preview

This displays a preview text in different font sizes.

Using the context menu enables you to zoom in and out, select a preview type (Standard Preview or All Characters) and change the preview text.

Launch the application KFontview if you need additional preview types for Unicode Blocks.