As of 2021, this tool is obselete on personal computers, since Windows now allows you to install fonts on a user basis. Nevertheless, it remains useful on network computers where rights are restricted under user policy. This program now exists as a relic of the lengths went to in order to use beloved custom fonts on public computers.
Font Tool is a small utility to help people who operate on many workstations use their fonts in a portable way. This removes the necessity of having administrator privileges: the fonts are loaded into memory temporarily and are unloaded once the user logs off or closes the programme. No changes to the disk are made, save for a small fonts file which acts as a database to store locations of added fonts.
Font Tool has been designed especially with portability and ease of use in mind. The executable weighs very little, is statically-linked, operating within a single executable which can be renamed and placed anywhere, and makes no permanent changes to the computer. However, for the most portability, it is recommended to place the executable in a folder on the same drive as the user's font files to remove the dependency of a changing drive letter.
One aspect that makes this programme much better for font loading than other font-loading programmes, apart from its easy-to-use interface, is the multi-threaded approach to loading fonts. Instead of waiting n * t time for fonts to load, one must only wait t time as fonts are loaded in parallel, boosting productivity and ease-of-use. (n is the number of fonts; t is the time taken for each font to load).
A minimal UI has been created to make it as easy as possible to load and unload fonts. One can load fonts by using the dedicated button, through drag-and-drop onto the window, through drag-and-drop onto the executable, as well as through a menu in the system tray for easy access. This vast array of methods is part of a struggle to make the programme as intuitive to use as possible.
Loaded fonts are conveniently displayed in a tree view and sorted by the manner in which they were added.
Although the programme is not a font manager (see Why Not?), it tries to display fonts in folders as they are arranged on the disk. Fonts can be revealed by activating their corresponding item in the tree view.
Font Tool indexes loaded fonts into a database file fonts which is stored relative to the executable. The fonts file allows for the programme to automatically re-load previously-loaded fonts upon start-up, further increasing the user's productivity if parallelisation was not enough. Of course, this means that Font Tool is partially dependant on a database file to operate as smoothly as possible (see Why Not?).
There are also a couple command-line switches available:
USAGE: [OPTION]... [FILE]...
A very easy-to-use, portable and friendly font loader.
-d | --do-not-show | --hidden
Open with a hidden window. Useful when
opening as a start-up executable.
-n | --no-tray
Do not add a system tray icon. This can be
combined with -d for a completely silent
background application.
-s | --supress-updates
Disable updates.
-h | --help
Display this help message.
Font Tool is developed by a humble 15-year-old enduring the endless, excruciating struggle of exam preparation. Due to the small nature of the project, compilation takes place through the use of scripts in shell script which call the MSVC compiler. This, of course, is unlike the programme itself, in that it is very unportable. Please feel free to fork this project, convert it to use a MakeFile instead, and request to pull. Font Tool is now using the CMake build system. See Building to build it from source.
Font Tool is only available on Windows OSs. The main goal of the utility is to overcome the administrator barrier when installing fonts. However, on most *nix-based operating systems it is nearly trivial to load fonts as a regular user. The user locations for fonts are as follows:
| OS | Location |
|---|---|
| OSX | ~/Library/Fonts/ |
| Linux OSs (Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, etc and their spin-offs) | ~/.local/share/fonts~/.fonts |
Font Tool is no font manager. Font managers include Typograf and nexusfont, which allow for much more control over already-installed and external fonts. Of course, this leads to a larger executable footprint and a greater difficulty of use, as well as bloaty features not useful for people who simply want to use fonts.
Font Tool is dumb! Error handling and font organisation are of minimal existence. The only way the programme attempts to group fonts is by their folder (if they were added as part of a folder), or whether the font is unable to be loaded. Furthermore, fonts are displayed by their filename, and the software makes no attempt to provide information to do with font contents: no previews, no display of font name, no display of font weight, etc. However, this allows the programme to be as lightweight as possible, and to minimise the amount of time required for use, maximising the time the user actually uses the loaded fonts.
Font Tool is buggy! Of course, it is created only by a school kid. There are still many ways to achieve segmentation faults even after months of development. Please feel free to debug and fix these issues!
Font Tool is not totally independent. As explained in How?, Font Tool uses a database file fonts. This file can be deleted freely before, during and after the use of the programme, without any adverse effects. However, it is cautioned against modifying the fonts file directly as segmentation faults can easily occur due to a lack of validation: the programme expects the fonts file to be perfectly formed.
To get the programme, go to the releases tab in the code view. German versions of the programme are also available.
Font Tool is developed in C++ and C++ only. It relies on WxWidgets to provide it's GUI, boost for high-level filesystem functions, curl to download updates, and Intel TBB for concurrent vectors.
Font Tool is now using the CMake build system. See Building to build it from source.
The German translation is in broken German. It can be compiled by defining LANG=1 to the pre-processor. Please see locale.cpp to help fix all the errors in translation.
Font Tool uses CMake.
- Gather the prerequisites:
- Intel's Threading Building Blocks
- WxWidgets
- Boost and
- Curl.
- Open an MSVC developer command prompt.
- Clone this repository and change directory to it:
git clone https://github.com/fiercedeity-productions/font-tool.git && cd font-tool
- Create a
Builddirectory:mkdir Build && cd Build
- Run
cmake:cmake -G "NMake Makefiles" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release .. - If building the German mode, append
-DLANG=1to the above command. - Finally, Run
nmaketo compile the code:nmake -NOLOGO
- That's it! A stand-alone executable
FontTool.exewill be created in theBuilddirectory. You can move this file anywhere you want.