lubuntu font installer (just an idea)

[PCMan]

I really think that it's a good idea.
KDE supports this IIRC.
Installing a font in Linux should be easy and just involves copy &
paste or drag & drop
It's not difficult to implement at all.
For example, a user bought some commercial true type fonts for use in Windows.
The fonts sit happily in C:\windows\fonts.
Someday he started using Lubuntu.
Then he needs to generate deb packages for each of them and submit bug
reports in the tracker of lubuntu to have them packaged.
Then, he needs to wait for the next iteration of Lubuntu release to
get these packages.
If the fonts are not free fonts, there is no way to have them packaged
by Lubuntu team.
So, packaging everything apparently does not work in this case.
Just having a tool to copy the *.ttf files to the font dir and calls
fc-cache update is enough.
The main UI can be simple, and the "sudo fc-cache" call can be
replaced with a policykit action, I think.
However we should only install the fonts to some restricted place like
/usr/share/fonts/<our_own_folder> and not mixed with others installed
by the packaging system.

Just my two cents.

On Mon, Jul 16, 2012 at 10:51 AM, Jonathan Marsden <jmarsden at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> Karl,
>
> On 07/15/2012 03:36 PM, Karl Anliot wrote:
>
>> Lubuntu doesn't have an automatic way to install font files. I
>> noticed a user asking how to do this in lubuntu, he must have had a
>> font he needed to use.
>
>> A new program could list fonts to remove, and install fonts from
>> font files, and launch a font viewer if the user wants to look at a
>> font. Someone could code this?
>
> Perhaps, but is there a good reason to do so?  Fonts can and (IMO)
> should be packaged, just like other installable software.  They can then
> be installed using existing package management tools (dpkg, apt-get,
> synaptic, lsc, software center, ...), and updated automatically that way
> as needed.
>
> Creating and maintaining a new "special" application just to install
> fonts does not seem to me to have significant benefits, when packages
> and all their associated software tools and infrastructure already exist.
>
> Worst case, if a user is willing to "go around" the package management
> system to install an unpackaged font, they can use pcmanfm or any other
> file management tool to create a directory under
> /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ , copy their *.ttf files in there, and then run
>
>   sudo fc-cache -f -v
>
> This is the exact same approach described for Ubuntu at
>
>   https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Fonts
>
> As far as I can see, Lubuntu is no better and no worse than Ubuntu in
> this respect.  When a user asks how to install an unpackaged font, and
> they are unwilling to package it, I suggest we can direct them to that
> wiki page.
>
> Jonathan
>
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