Gnome Font Manager
One thing I miss on Linux Gnome is font manager. Not just a font viewer but a proper manager like the old Adobe Type Manager. So I thought: Well, lets create one then! It might be that it already exist some font managers for Linux/Gnome but as always; this will be a good project for learning new stuff so I really don’t care if there are 1000 font managers out there 
Font parsing
The first thing to do, and that I have done, is porting my font parser from PLib to C#. That was no major head ache. There are at least to different font classes available in C# Mono (`System.Drawing.Font` and `Pango.Font`) but they don’t give all information about the font that I want.
Worth mentioning is that I heavily used the Mono DataConverter class to unpack the binary strings in the fonts. The unpack() function in PHP is just tremendous and there doesn’t seem to be a native alike in C#. But thanks to Miguel de Icasa’s DataConverter it went quite alright.
Font preview
The next thing to do was figuring out how to create the font previews. And I figured it out First I though of using the console program gnome-thumbnail-font to create the previews but I had to throw that one into the bin since it doesn’t seem to handle multi line text. Since I’ve never used the graphics functions in C# before I came to the conclusion that I had to create the previews all by my self. It was quite easy finding good examples on the net of how to create text images with C#. A couple of hours later that problem was also solved (as you can see in the screen shot below). And man the graphics stuff in C# is fast. The preview images are generated instantly!
Next step
I have a lot left to do before this is a useful program but we’re heading there. One feature I’m planning on implementing is the ability to create your own font sets that you can activate/deactivate.
And I will probably come up with some more stuff to add, but that will be a later head ache!
Screen shot: Gnome Font Manager
Looks great. When are you releasing the code?
This project has been resting for a while and the computer on which I have the code isn’t working at the moment. No hard drive failure though so the code is safe. I will try to get the computer working in the next couple of weeks and then I’ll look into this code and may as well release the code in it’s current state. At the moment it’s pretty much just a font viewer though.
Since several months have passed since the last comment was left regarding this project, I would love to know if you have managed to recover the code for this and resume working on it. I have been searching (to no avail) for a reasonable font viewer/manager app for Gnome, and so far this looks to be the best option.
Looking forward to being able to use this lovely app!
Indeed I’ve got the old computer up and running again and the code is recovered. I haven’t done anything with it yet though but if anyone wants the code I can share it. It’s not the best C# code but at least some of the stuff is working
Dear Pontus,
I see that you are working on font parsing. We would be very interested in your progress. We are currently building a system that is to generate PDFs (in AS3). We have looked at AlivePDF for it but there the font embedding isn’t implemented yet. The problem is especially in the (non typical) mathematical characters that we need for our project. Would be nice if you and our programmer, Jasper Rense, could share some experiences in this field.
Hope to hear from you soon.
Best regards
Chris Bisschops
(Commercial manager at SuperConnie Software)