TypeAtlas font explorer

TypeAtlas is a featureful graphical font explorer targeting GNU/Linux, without disregarding cross-platform compatibility. See Screenshots.

TypeAtlas provides:

• Complete list of system fonts.
  • Limited listing of fonts on remote fontconfig systems, including servers.
  • Browsing and preview of font files that have yet to be installed.
• Per-font preview and information:
  • Multi-language font previews, with three preview styles for individual fonts, and two preview styles for multiple fonts.
  • Complete character map display for the individual fonts, and limited multi-font character map display.
  • Extended information, include language support; classification by font's PANOSE properties; and font license preview (fontTools only).
• Font searching and filtering:
  • Search by font name.
  • Search by file name using the file: keyword, or file path using the path: keyword
  • Search for supported characters using the charset: keyword (slow) or the dedicated Font Sampler comparison utility (very slow)
  • Search by supported languages (fontconfig only) and writing systems
  • Search by font class: by guessed generic family (Serif or Sans Serif), by the PANOSE properties of the fonts when available, and by various other font attributes.
  • Saveable and restorable searches and filters.
• Manual categorization using manual tags and categories, and searching by them.
• Multiple interface modes, including simpler and more complex ones.
• Additional tools:
  • GlyphAtlas - a basic standalone character map (less mature than kcharmap or gucharmap), with support for legacy encodings, including modes of interpretation of their unicode translation for ambiguous encodings (including graphical characters).
  • A graphical character selector that can be invoked from other utilties or script
  • The typefind command line search utility, whose typefind --chars abc search is easier to use than fc-match :charset=0061.
• Small helpful facilities, such as getting the fontspec code for XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX for the selected font.

TypeAtlas can be used as a feature-heavy GUI frontend for fontconfig's fc-list and fc-match utilities.

Installation

GNU/Linux: Manual installation

Before you install TypeAtlas, you need to install PyQt and fontTools:

On Ubuntu, Debian or other Debian-based, this can be done with:

sudo apt-get install python3-pyqt5 python3-fonttools python3-pip python3-magic

On Fedora, this can be done with

sudo dnf install python3 python3-qt5 python3-fonttools python3-magic

You can install it in your home directory using pip:

pip3 install --user typeatlas

If you have downloaded the source, you can run TypeAtlas directly from the source tree:

./typeatlas-qt

...or install it in your user's home directory from there, too:

./setup.py install --user

On the first run, TypeAtlas will perform a slow scan the fonts on your system, and generate a database of additional information. On non-fontconfig systems, this can take a significant amount of time.

Requirements

• Operating system support
  • TypeAtlas targets and is tested on GNU/Linux, which is the only officially supported platform.
  • Unix-like systems that rely on fontconfig are expected to work with no or minor adjustments.
  • Provided are OS-agnostic fallbacks for operation on e.g. macOS and Windows with some loss of functionality, but no testing is being done on such platforms.
• Python 3.7 or later. Python 3.5 or even 3.4 may work, but have not been tested, and any effort to preserve compatibility with them is not expected to last.
• PyQt5 or PySide2, along with Qt 5. Qt 6 support has not been added yet.
• Fontconfig 2.13 or later. Version 2.11 breaks font character set functionality. Operation without fontconfig is possible, but at the expense of worse performance and lack of font language detection.
• fontTools 3.35 or later. Older versions have not been tested. It is optional on fontconfig systems, where it provides mostly cosmetic features. On non-fontconfig systems or systems with fontconfig 2.11, lack of fontTools will severely degrade performance.
• An awful lot of RAM if you have a lot of fonts.

Known issues

TypeAtlas is in development, and as such it is expected to contain a non-trivial quantity of known and unknown bugs. At the moment, the most significant issues that can be faced are as follows:

• First run takes a significant amount of time, some spent on things not critically necessary.
• With multiple fonts are selected, copying characters or selecting blocks in the character map only acknowledges the first font. The multiple font mode is otherwise incomplete.
• When saving tags, TypeAtlas can helpfully erase the icon and colour choice you just made.
• When configuring choice for multiple languages, automated inferences about font support can be wrong.
• Significant memory footprint. This is mostly as a result of the memory consumed by loading and displaying a large font list, but can be alleviated in the future by disabling display of features, or delaying the load of parts of the information, or providing a non-Qt interface.
• Very slow handling of CJK fonts, in particular when loading more than one of them in the character map.
• Character map filtering can also be faster.
• Many of the advanced features are not well tested, particularly involving the loading or management of complex filters, and may malfunction or crash.

The following bugs have been experienced in the past during the development:

• Sudden hang with 100% CPU consumption. Report if this still hapens.
• Crashes on strange fonts due to Qt bugs (this is workarounded).