Font Manager is a GTK+ font management application which allows previewing, enabling/disabling fonts and font collections, font installation and removal and more.

The application is not new and you'll find it in the Ubuntu (and Fedora, etc.) repositories but it hasn't been updated in about 4 years. Recently, the Font Manager developer started working on a new GTK3/Vala version and he needs you to test it and post feedback.

The initial Vala/GTK3 Font Manager version (0.7) is currently considered alpha quality and if you can test it and give feedback, it "would be incredibly useful to determine whether it can move to beta or even a release", as Jerry Casiano, the Font Manager developer, recently told me in an email. So if you want to post feedback, issues, suggestions or whatever regarding the current development (SVN) version, see THIS page.

In 2013, the Mozilla Foundation commissioned Erik Spiekermann, a famous typographer, to work on a free, open source font family called Fira Sans (initially called Feura Sans).

Recently, the typeface was updated to version 3.1, getting 12 different weights (bringing the weights number to 16), all accompanied by italic styles, a huge character map and extensive language supports. There's also a monospaced variant: Fira Mono which includes 2 weights (regular and bold).

Installing the Windows 8.1 fonts in Ubuntu means you'll get any new fonts that Microsoft included in the latest Windows Preview (like Segoe UI Black, Segoe UI Emoji and a few others) as well as the latest version of popular fonts like Arial, Tahoma, Calibri, Segoe UI, Verdana, Times New Roman and so on.

Below you'll find instructions for downloading the Windows 8.1 Preview ISO from Microsoft, extracting the fonts from the ISO (because the fonts can't be redistributed) using 7zip and Wimlib and installing the fonts in Ubuntu, either system-wide or for your user only. The instructions are based on / adapted from the tt-ms-win8 AUR package (thanks to reflexing!).

While working on the Infinality article, I've noticed that "slow", who is behind the Infinality PPA for Ubuntu, maintains another PPA for OpenJDK7 and OpenJDK8 which comes with a patch that improves the font rendering for Java / Swing applications in Linux.

Infinality is a set of Freetype patches that try to provide an improved font rendering for Linux and also, to allow easy customization so the users can adjust the settings to their taste. Using it, you can easily set the font style to emulate OSX, OSX2, Windows 98, WIndows XP or Windows 7 or you can use the "Linux" or "Infinality" (default) styles.

Oxygen font family is already available for testing (currently in alpha!) and comes with regular, bold and monospace variants, however, only the basic character shapes are done for now and the font is currently using the basic 'auto spacing' from FontForge.

Mousewheel Zoom, a Gnome Shell tool that enables a Compiz-like ALT + mousewheel zoom, is now available in a PPA for Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tobias-quinn/gsmz
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell-mousewheel-zoom

To make it easier to install and stay up to date with the latest versions, I've also uploaded the new font version to the WebUpd8 Ubuntu Font Family PPA, for Ubuntu 11.04, 10.10 and 10.04 - add the PPA and install it using the following commands: