Free font software for linux

VSOFont is a small library used to draw very simple and fast user definable 2D vector fonts. At some point in time, when working with handheld devices, the font functions GLUT offered proved to be too massive. so i decided to write a very simple 3D vector text system using OpenGL myself. The application is coded in ANSI C.
Enhancements:
- added vsofont_read_font_from_memory().
- changed vsofont_read_font() to vsofont_read_font_from_file().
- example shows now how to draw a bolded string.
- VSOFONT header file should now work in C++ projects.
- small optimizations here and there.

FONTpage is a Python font viewing and image-generating utility. It displays system fonts and allows you to change the font size and color, background color, font face, bold, and italics.
It also has the ability to input the text to be displayed, which you can choose to save as a PNG file. It is handy to view fonts and styles quickly, or to make "logo" graphics.
It was written to supersede wxFontView, as the pyGTK toolkit is much lighter and more widely used.
Enhancements:
- New "Display Font" feature opens popup window with complete alphabet (upper and lower case) and 0-9.
- Window shows current font with current size -- use multiple windows to compare different fonts.
- Font size now scales up to 256 pts (was 128)
- Config file will now track last window dimensions when the application is restarted.
- If user font directory directory (~/.fonts) does not exist, FONTpage will create one. This is to facilitate installing and deleting fonts, which FONTpage will only do on a per-user basis. (This is to avoid problems.)

GNU font utilities to allow conversion of a scanned type specimen image into an outline (PostScript or Metafont) font. These fonts can be used with Ghostscript or TeX.
Since the fontutils were originally written in the early 1990s, other programs have been developed which do a better job of some parts of this task. Here is a list of the fontutils programs with indications of their current status:
- imgrotate: rotates images 90 degrees, an inefficiently-implemented subset of pnmrotate (from netpbm).
- imageto: extracts individual characters from a large image; still useful.
- fontconvert: some features may still be useful, such as creating a tfm file from a bitmap.
- charspace: allows non-interactive side bearing specification, so possibly still useful. On the other hand, fontforge allows interactive specification, and has a very nice preview window for testing side bearings.
- gsrenderfont: a shell script that converts outline fonts to bitmaps at a given size. This is called from TeX programs under certain circumstances. The version here has long been replaced by the scripts in the TeX distributions.
- limn: does the actual conversion from bitmaps to splines. These days, youre much better off using autotrace or potrace.
- bzrto: conversion from the generic homegrown `bzr (Bezier) format output by limn to PostScript Type 1, PostScript Type 3, or Metafont. Obsolete.
- bpltobzr: translate the binary bzr format into an equivalent text format `bpl (bezier property list), for editing. Fortunately, a full-featured free outline font editor, fontforge, has been written (by George Williams).
- xbfe: bitmap font editor for shapes and metrics; astonishingly, it seems there are still no bitmap editors for any format except BDF, so still useful.

Choosefont is a simple but extremely efficient tool for quickly finding the required font in a large amount of fonts.

It was created due to the lack of decent font selection widgets in many application.

Apart from finding a font, Choosfont can also creat css, html and other code for the selected font, this code is automatically copied to the X clipboard.

x-fontperf is a small utility to measure font rendering/loading time in an x11 environment. Originally intended to see if there is any notable performance difference between a separate font server and local font rendering.
It actually does three different tests:
1) Loading the same font several times
Gives you an average loading time for this particular font. If you use a font already in use in your x-session this should be really quick as this font will be reused and not actually loaded again (cached)
2) Loading the same font in different sizes (incrementing)
Default is from 6 to 144 pixel. Interesting to see how rendering time increases with font size (see option -v)
3) Loading all available fonts
This should give you a good estimate on average fontloading time. Also a good test to stress your system and check if all fonts are loadable (see option -e)
Sample output:
x-fontperf -v
x-fontperf: Copyright (c) Holger Pfaff - http://pfaff.ws
x-fontperf: version 1.1 from 26-Mar-2004
x-fontperf: connected to server: :0.0
x-fontperf: server vendor: Gentoo Linux (XFree86 4.3.0, revision r3)
x-fontperf: vendor release: 40300000
x-fontperf: total of 6406 fonts found
x-fontperf: basefont: -*-helvetica-*-*-*-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1
x-fontperf: loading basefont 100 times ... 6292 usec 62 usec/font
x-fontperf: loading font from pixel size 6 to 144 ... 2977820 usec 21578 usec/font
x-fontperf: loading all 6406 available fonts ... 34965472 usec 5458 usec/font
Usage:
Usage: x-fontperf ...
-display X-display to use
-v Increase verbosity (may falsify results)
-e Show errors during tests
-n Number of iterations for test 1 [100]
-min Minimum pixel size for test 2 [6]
-max Maximum pixel size for test 2 [144]
-foundry Foundry of font [*]
-family Family of font [helvetica]
-weight Weight of font [*]
-slant Slant of font [*]
-setwidth Set width of font [*]
-addstyle Additional style of font [*]
-pixelsize Pixel size of font [12]
-pointsize Point size of font [*]
-resolutionX X resolution of font [*]
-resolutionY Y resolution of font [*]
-spacing Spacing of font [*]
-avgwidth Average width of font [*]
-registry Registry of font [iso8859]
-encoding Encoding of font [1]
Verbosity can be increased in three steps by specifying -v several times. No-
tation -vvv is not supported. Use -v -v -v. Errors opening fonts are not shown
by default. Use -e to see them.
-n specifies the number of iterations for test 1. The default of 100 (shown in
brackets) should be ok for most systems. Increase/decrease values for fast/slow
systems
-min/-max specifies the minimum/maximum pixel size for test 2. Pixel sizes are
incremented by one.
The last block of arguments is for specifying the basefont to use for tests 1
and 2. These follow the standard x11 font naming scheme. Again: defaults are
shown in brackets.
Enhancements:
- first public version 1.0

Font Manager is a font manager for GNOME. Font Manager cannot do any font management tasks yet, but is already useful for picking fonts.
Main features:
- List installed fonts
- Add previews for installed fonts
- Open font properties from context menu
- Set system fonts from the font manager
- Make the font manager installable

fontimage project is a small, portable tool that generates PNG images of text strings directly from outline font files.
Main features:
- only depnends on libpng and freetype, should be very portable
- handles charaters outside of ascii range
- Licensed under GNU GPL
- Tested on Fedora Core 5 and CentOS 4.3