It seems that you've hit on a rather large obstacle that will need to be fixed at some point for a Linux OS to grow into something more professional than it is already...

I seriously doubt that - I fail to see the reason why an ordinary user would be needing to configure their fonts.

Designers, sure - but the majority of home computer users aren't designers.

Maybe it would be the best idea to bite the bullet and sort out the mess instead? Xorg has done this, sound is underway and so on and so forth. Not fun, but the way forward. Probably needs double the amount of thinking. :) But a great goal for something sponsored by say Canonical.

What is it about the fonts which requires human input, preventing fontconfig configuring defoma?

Awww i tried doing graphic design in linux, but the font managing sucked so hard i went back to linux, i say implement support for the MOST common, leave java out and old libraries, and make a lot of us happy.

For non-X applications (e.g. TeX/ghostscript) it's a whole different story again.

What about XeTeX? Perhaps it's the way to go.

Thanks for the extensive reply! But I'm not completely sold that the technical side of this is really that difficult. After all, there _are_ font packages (.debs) in Debian and Ubuntu already, and they can be installed with apt and (afaik) don't require any user input during installation.

From what I see, the hard parts would be this:
- make sure the applications like OpenOffice or Gimp notice the new font without restart (apparently this doesn't yet work; would probably require application changes, maybe so they watch the fonts folder with inotify and rebuild their fonts list?)
- create a list of font information and font preview images, for displaying in the GUI (similar to the information that is displayed in the app installer)
- generally package more fonts than are currently available in Ubuntu repos
- actually making a GUI app, with all the usual hard work for building a user-friendly app :)

In fact, the current app installer "just" builds upon apt as well, so couldn't the font installer be built with similar technical foundations? Also, apparently PackageKit is targeted at exactly this kind of stuff already.

It may be true that font management in linux is a complex issue. If this is the case, then linux should be improved to support a better framework. Fonts are one of the most fundamental elements of modern computing, and improving the linux framework would be a huge plus for designers and regular users.

Even if the complexities of font management can not be worked out immediately, why not set up an initial version that has only TT fonts or something? It's often not necessary to provide ALL functionality on the first release of a project.

Normal users don't configure their fonts. Instead, they have the most difficulties changing or installing them.

Sorry but this just seems like a standard "I don't want to work on that" response.
Of course, this is a valid response if you're working for free. But I rather hoped Brainstorm was to help focus paid and otherwise committed resources.

Every significant OS has had a wealth of font options. There are multiple levels of truetype and postscript fonts, various bitmap formats, older vector formats. These are supported on Windows, and on OS/2, and presumably Mac OS. If it was an easy job it would have been done already.

As others have said, perhaps this is just the tip of the iceberg, that the font infrastructure in Linux might be broken; if so solve that first. But just saying it's too hard and giving up isn't appropriate for this kind of forum.

All too many suggestion systems get killed by the people creating them not liking the answers.

I absolutely agree with egg-sandwich. It's somewhat frustrating that this idea has a lot of interest, yet one developer comes along and seems to rule the entire idea out.

Why not just create a tool for downloading/installing fonts into the TT directories or the .font home dir? That doesn't sound too complex, and would be very useful.

I think a limited GUI font-support is still good for most users.

I think most linux users, like me, usually do font installation by copying font files to "/usr/share/fonts/truetype/" manually. In some other distros, I'll have to update font cache by command lines. That is really annoying. I'll appreciate any GUI solution for this even if it is not effective to some applications. A fair prompt on this is enough for me.