A new version of Font Manager, a GTK app to browse and install fonts on Linux desktops, is now available for download.
The Font Manager 0.8.0 update introduces integration with Google Fonts, one of the largest online sources of freely licensed font families.
Users can click the ‘G’ tool bar icon to instantly access more than 1,000 fonts distributed through Google’s type hub. Fonts can be display by name, recency, popularity, or ‘trending’, and filtered by font type, variation, and language support.
Font families can be previewed instantaneously in an increasing-size ‘waterfall’ presentation (the exact text can be customised) or a big block of randomly placeholder text. Font size, colour, and background colour are all configurable too.
When you see a font you like you can download it easily enough. First, select the font family you want (or an individual weight/variant) then hit the ‘download’ button’ in the middle toolbar.
Being able to sift, sort and install Google Fonts from a desktop app isn’t new — a number of desktop apps have offered similar functionality, including TypeCatcher and FontFinder — but it is new to this particular tool.
Elsewhere in this release, the developers have updated Unicode data support for v13 (handy if you use emoji fonts); and made it possible to save font compare list contents.
A GNOME Shell search provider is also included, making it easy to find installed fonts by searching them by name in the GNOME Applications/overview screen.
You can get a much better feel of the changes present in this update (plus a look at the app using a much better theme than the one in my screenshots) in this video overview courtesy of Libre Graphics World:
Install Font Manager on Ubuntu
Font Manager is free, open source software. New versions of the app can be found on Flathub, though Arch users can also get it from the AUR.
If you’re on Ubuntu (and since you’re reading this site there’s a very good chance you are) you can use the official Font Manager staging PPA to install the latest master build of the utility on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and above:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:font-manager/staging
sudo apt install font-manager
Once installed just launch the app from your application menu. The first time you run the app it may require a couple of seconds to detect and display your fonts, especially if you have a lot installed.