Dear Lennart Poettering,
As the (arguably) most hated and yet quite adored Linux developer you are known to come up with new low-level solutions that streamline desktop experience. I hereby urge you to invent fontd. Here is why.
Every time a new font gets added to the list of available fonts, running applications have to be restarted to benefit from that. This is probably not such a big deal for ordinary desktop users who are mostly fine with default selection of fonts, but here in the designland it’s worse than a misery.
We use software such as Fontmatrix for managing our huge collections of fonts, and these collections don’t get any smaller over years. A 5000 fonts large collection is quite common by modern standards, if not on a smallish side.
It’s not because we are compulsive hoarders, it’s just we can’t calmly walk by yet another absolutely fucking gorgeous little typeface. So we pick it up and add it to the heap, next to terabytes of clip art and photo collections.
Er, now that I come to think of it, yes, we are compulsive hoarders. But that’s a prerequisite for making beautiful designs. So do you care?
Now that you mentally erased the last two paragraphs out of embarrassment, here’s the deal: we need to keep tons of fonts in the system, enabling and disabling small portions of them as we see fit for working on a particular project.
As you might guess, restarting graphic design apps all the time makes us sad. Picture yourself a creepy three-legged kitten with half the tail and bulging eyes. That sad.
Now that you mentally erased yet another paragraph, here’s another quick summary: we need some clever way to ping applications about newly available fonts and let them quickly rebuild the list of available fonts. It could be the greatest mistake on my part, but isn’t D-BUS the kind of way to do exactly that? So maybe there could be a fontd to deal with that?
What if it sounds like a clever plan? Would 3rd party developers support that? There already is support for D-BUS in both GIMP and Inkscape, and I’d be surprised if Calligra Suite/Krita didn’t make at least some of use of D-BUS. Plus, for Scribus as a Qt app it would be a low-hanging fruit. The rest could either not bother or join the circus.
Truly yours,
Creepy kitten, gloating yet another typeface catalog as you finish reading this open letter.
