More on Fonts..

Those of you who read my prior post on Ubuntu Fonts & followed Carthik’s howto, might be interested in installing Gnome Specimen. This fantastic little program lets you compare all your fonts; making choosing the right one to use in your work a lot easier.

To install, simply open up a terminal & enter..

sudo apt-get install gnome-specimen

Press y to confirm the installation when asked.

Once installed, the program can be found in the Graphics category of the main Gnome menu under the name of Specimen Font Previewer.

As you can see from the screen shot, the program is really easy to use. All the fonts installed on your system will show up in the left pane of the window. Each font name has a small arrow to the left of it that shows (or hides) all the modes of that font (Bold, Italic, etc.) when pressed. Select the modes of the fonts that you want to compare & press the add button. If you want to compare all the modes for a font, you can highlight the name of the font & click the add button. It will add all the supported modes for that particular font to the list.

The great thing about this program is that you can change the size or colour of the fonts, add new fonts to the list that you’re comparing & instantly see any changes you make. There’s no messing about with reloading every time a change is made or anything

This is an extremely useful program & I can’t see it being too long before It’s either installed as standard on Ubuntu, or it gets converted & fully merged into the Gnome desktop software.