Today, each application, and each toolkit, offers font selection. But fonts have become gradualy more complex, and none of the interfaces seem really excellent. None of the libre graphics programs support the range of font features avaiable in newer or more “mainstream” commercial software such as Photoshop or Figma. It’s not a race, we dont have to copy other software, but the additional complexity of fonts, and OpenType in particular, was added to meet real needs that we can’t easily serve today.
Desktop packaging systems were not designed for packaging individual fonts (and users end up searching 100,000 packages without previews).
We could improve things one program at a time (I originally wanted to start with GIMP) but that leaves the user frustrated.
We could improve one toolkit at a time, such as Gtk or Qt.
Or we could make a desktop-wide service that any toolkit could use, and that’s client-agnostic, so people could write multiple font tools. That way, we could maybe pool our knowledge, too.
This proposal is to see how far we can plausibly take the idea of a desktop font service for font management, selection, configuration, searching. Perhaps the service could sit on top of dbus, with a font client being started automatically by the desktop (dbus is cross-platform).
