Fontasia: View and categorize your fonts

I'm so jazzed about my new font viewer/categorizer. It's something I've wanted absolutely forever -- a way to categorize/tag my zillions of fonts into groups like techno, script, blocky, western, gothic etc.

It's called fontasia, and it's written in Python using python-gtk.

Here it is: fontasia-0.7.

You can also get the latest at GitHub: fontasia.

You can view categories, or all fonts in any category (so you don't have to see all the lousy system fonts you wish would go away), or all fonts as yet uncategorized (so you can categorize them). Click the buttons in the list on the right to toggle which categories any given font is in.

As of version 0.7, it can also work as a plug-in font chooser for GIMP. Save it to your GIMP plug-ins directory, and make sure it's executable.

User Guide

Initially, the font list on the left shows all the fonts on your system. Clicking on a font shows that font in the preview area at the upper right. The preview area is editable -- you can change the text if you don't care about quick brown foxes and lazy dogs. The Size spinbox controls the size of the preview; the Bold and Italic buttons do the obvious.

Below the preview are your categories (initially none). You can add new categories by typing a category name in the text field and clicking Add category.

Clicking one of the category buttons adds the currently viewed font to that category (and the button should turn green). A font can be in multiple categories.

To view only fonts in a particular category, use the option menu at the top right under the preview. You can view any category, or several special categories:

• "All fonts" shows all the fonts on your system.
• "All fonts in categories" shows you every font you've categorized in any way. Use this to see all the fonts you consider worthwhile, without having to wade through all those yucky system fonts.
• "All uncategorized" lets you see everything you haven't categorized yet -- it's useful when you're initially classifying your fonts, or when you've just installed some new ones that need to be categorized.

When you exit, fontasia saves its categories to a file called ~/.fontasia.

Tip: when initially going through my system fonts, I found it useful to use downarrow to go to the next font in the list. I exited periodically (e.g. I'd do all the "a, b, c and d" fonts then exit and restart) in case of disaster -- remember fontasia is brand new, though I haven't had a crash yet.

Bugs/Plans

I know the button area doesn't have enough space and the buttons don't need to be that big. I'll fix that soon.

Let me know if you have any problems with fontasia, if you like it, don't like it, or have suggestions for a name or for user interface improvements!

Changelog

1/12/2011: 0.6

Patch from Michael Schumacher for config file path on Windows

1/4/2011: 0.5

Add bold and italic buttons.

9/28/2010: 0.4

Lots of UI changes -- buttons in a table, combobox instead of option menu, shifted some widgets around.

Add a couple of default categories if the user doesn't have a .fontasia (Gagan's suggestion).

Workaround for fonts with a number in the name -- Pango "helpfully" interprets the number as a desired font size.

9/3/2010: 0.3

Render fonts in the font list (optionally, since it's slower). Also some other reliability fixes. Thanks Mikael Magnusson!

8/17/2010: Rename from catefont to fontasia.

8/13/2010: 0.2.

8/11/2010: Initial release.