Font Manager

 A font management application for the GNOME desktop

The Collections area, where fonts can be grouped into collections and activated or de-activated all at once.

After creating a new collection, to place fonts in it just drag and drop them from the fonts column onto the newly created collection.

The Fonts area, allows selecting which font to preview, activating or de-activating fonts, and includes a basic search function for listed fonts.

Selecting multiple fonts can be done by clicking and dragging, or by using shift / control key combinations.

The Preview area, where font styles can be previewed individually or compared in a list, selecting a font style is done by using the combobox at the top, the size of the font used in the preview can be changed with the slider at the bottom, or for more control the spinbutton at the top right.

Custom text allows seeing how entered text would look in the selected font, compare mode also allows changing font / background colors.

If file-roller is installed on the system, exporting collections to an archive, font installation and removal become available options.

If gucharmap is installed, a "shortcut" will be available which opens gucharmap with the currently selected font active. This allows for closer inspection of characters included in the font as well as quickly determining coverage.

If the ReportLab Toolkit is available, on most Linux distributions this is called python-reportlab, then an option to include a sample sheet in exported collections becomes available. At this point only TrueType and Type 1 fonts are supported.

ReportLab will refuse to embed fonts which restrict it in their license, those with invalid names and those that are just broken internally.

If this occurs, a dialog will show you which fonts were rejected and for what reason. In the case where a font just has an invalid PostScript font name you just need to rename the font using a font editor, such as FontForge, not only will this allow ReportLab to embed the font, but it will also ensure that other applications including Font Manager don't have problems with it.

Additional Notes:

The font installation feature accepts most common font formats along with the most common archive types. ( .ttf .ttc .otf .zip .tar* )

To select multiple files in the File Chooser use control / shift key combinations.

The font removal feature only applies to fonts that are installed in ~/.fonts or those that were installed by the application, it's possible that certain fonts will fail to uninstall - see Known Issues. In this case you'll need to remove the offending font manually.

Exporting and importing of managed fonts is not yet possible. If needed, see the 'Library' folder in ~/.fonts

Fonts with illegal or malformed names and those that are missing expected information such as family or style are not handled well. Although they may be displayed, features such as, previews, font information, font removal and exporting to archive are likely to fail silently. In some cases, while the font will appear in the list, the preview will only display a base font like Sans, and font information will be unavailable, this is usually an indication that the font needs to be renamed or is missing style information.

Quality fonts do not suffer from these issues.

That said, verification and automatic repair of such common problems may be included in a future release.

For now, if you encounter this, you can use a font editor to examine the font.
FontForge is a good choice and is already available for most distributions, check your package manager.
In most cases FontForge will notify you of any issues as soon as the font is opened, in other cases it may be as simple as renaming the font using a font editor so that the name contains no leading or trailing spaces, or adding missing information such as font style.